Recently, Thom Tillis sat opposite Stephanie Ruhle and attempted to clarify why the president continues to refer to the affordability crisis as a hoax. “I think he got bad advice,” the senator stated. Ruhle wouldn’t let it go. “Why do you talk about advice?” she asked. “He’s the president!”

Tillis did not have a response, and he is scarcely alone. In September, María Elvira Salazar ran an ad addressed to Trump personally, telling him that “some of your advisers are giving you bad advice“ on immigration enforcement. In June, Ted Cruz stated that the president, “unfortunately, is receiving bad advice“ on a deal with Iran. On Friday, Roger Wicker, the chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, wrote that Trump’s “instincts have been to finish the job he started in Iran, but he is being ill advised to pursue a deal.”

Wicker and Cruz believe the advisers are overly lenient toward Tehran. Salazar believes they are overly harsh on immigrants. Tillis has faulted them for Greenland, the attacks on the Fed and the cost of groceries. The advisers, seemingly, are mistaken about everything, in every direction simultaneously. The president’s instincts, however, are always fine. Whatever a Republican disapproves of originated from the staff, and whatever he approves of came from the man.

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There exists a traditional term for this. Historians of imperial Russia refer to it as naive monarchism: the peasant’s belief that the tsar was benevolent and just, and that every injustice in the village was the result of the actions of the officials around him, who deceived him about what his people endured. The tsar desired it, the expression went, but the boyars were resistant. Were the tsar only aware.

The notable aspect of naive monarchism, as historian Daniel Field demonstrated, is that it was not always naive. Peasants who rebelled against their landlords did so in the name of the tsar, and by declaring a naive devotion to the crown they earned themselves a degree of immunity from prosecution. The dedication was occasionally a tactic. You might resist the system as long as you claimed that you were protecting the person at the top of it.

This is what the Republican version entails. Nobody in the Senate really thinks that Donald Trump is a blank slate on which Stephen Miller writes. They use an old peasant tactic: register the complaint, protect oneself, remain loyal to the base. It allows a senator to inform his constituents that he is against the tariffs, or the war, or the raids, without having to tell them that he is opposed to the president who initiated them.

The distinction is that the Russian peasant had no vote, no subpoena authority, no place on the Armed Services Committee, and no constitutional obligation to check the executive. The tsar’s people had no alternative way to speak. Tillis has every other way to speak, and selects this one.

There is a particular type of person who deals with their cognitive dissonance regarding their support for Trump and his apparent insanity by convincing themselves: “No, Trump is fine. He’s just got crazy people in his ear.” It’s a fairly amusing kind of cognitive dissonance, and you have likely encountered it. I, personally, believe we ought to accept the premise and say: Alright, yes, Trump is getting poor advice. Yet if he’s so good in other respects, why can’t he recognize the poor advice?

Identifying poor advice is the task. Every president is surrounded by individuals who desire different things and inform him of different stories, and most of what they inform him of is incorrect in some manner. The office is there to assess it. Harry Truman, who had “The Buck Stops Here” on his desk, stated it simply in his farewell address: “The President--whoever he is--has to decide. He can’t pass the buck to anybody.” A president who cannot distinguish good counsel from bad has failed in the one part of the work that no one else can do for him. Viewed seriously, the defense amounts to an indictment, and a more harsh one than many of his critics bother to articulate.

However, the premise doesn’t withstand the record either, much of it provided by the president himself.

In February, following reports that the chairman of the Joint Chiefs had cautioned him about the risks of striking Iran, Trump contested the account and then made the relevant point: “I am the one that makes the decision.” When Goldman Sachs forecast that his tariffs would increase prices, he didn’t call upon his economists to reassess; he stated that the bank was “wrong, just like they are wrong about so much else.” And those around him have ceased pretending otherwise. Top advisers and elected Republican officials informed Axios that they do not even attempt to change his mind. “Why bother?” a longtime adviser remarked. “He’s the boss.”

The advisers who stay are those who learned not to inform him of what he does not want to hear, and they discovered it by observing what occurred to everyone who attempted. Selecting an adviser is in itself a decision, and so is retaining one. Trump selected the individuals around him because they concur with him, and he retains them for the same reason. When Tillis states the president is being poorly served by his staff, he is describing a staff that serves the president precisely as he wishes to be served.

Even Jonathan Martin, who spoke with Tillis regarding his new book, noticed the problem. The thesis of How to Lose Friends and Antagonize Presidents, Martin told him, is that Trump is being ill-served by the people around him, but he kept writing “him” in the margins, because so many of the examples were things Trump had said and done himself, from the tariffs to the Easter post threatening to bomb Iran. “Trump appointed these folks,” Martin stated. “Trump has stood by them.” Tillis’s response is worth reading carefully. He stated he hadn’t discovered any section in the Constitution “where you can fire him, and I’m not going to impeach him,” so the only thing he could alter was “the people around him.” There is indeed such a section, and Tillis has sat through two impeachment trials of this president and voted to acquit in both. What he implies is that he has eliminated the solution the Constitution provides and opted for the one the court permits.

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The strongest evidence opposing the bad-advice theory is that Trump also uses it.

When a federal court decided the previous year that he was without the authority to impose most of his tariffs, Trump didn’t fault himself for the appointments. He criticized the Federalist Society, which he claimed had provided him “bad advice“ on judicial nominations, and he labeled Leonard Leo a “sleazebag.” He is indebted to Leo, however: for his near-complete criminal immunity against any crimes he commits in office, for the end of the independent agencies, for his power to remove the inspectors general and make it stick, and for the notion, which individuals like Sarah Isgur argue the Constitution demands, that Congress oversteps its authority when it interferes with the president’s unified control over the executive branch. All three justices that Trump selected from a list reportedly curated by Leo were part of the majority in both of those rulings.

At an event at Stanford Law that I attended, someone who did not subscribe to the unitary executive theory nonetheless informed me it was “a respectable theory with a respectable scholarship among conservative jurists.” It’s actually not. It’s utter nonsense, and the absurdity of it is evident in what is unfolding at the White House daily. They were concerned about “unaccountable bureaucrats” who were “unelected” interfering with a legitimately elected president’s ability to implement his agenda. So we removed all the safeguards, exactly as they demanded, and just as Leonard Leo and individuals like Sarah Isgur argue is a respectable mainstream view, and we now watch as our country is ravaged and exploited. Isgur would respond that it had never been the role of an unaccountable, unelected inspector general to halt them, and that this was instead Congress’s responsibility. But we have factions, and when one faction controls all three branches, independent IGs would have been helpful, yes. Isgur likewise referred to the cover-up meeting regarding the Epstein files as a typical “dumb-dumb meeting,” one that any other administration in a similar situation would also have conducted. However, has any other administration been similarly positioned? Obama and Biden do not appear in the Epstein files like Trump does.

And now, with his support waning and the midterms just nine days off, he is blaming his own aides for a struggling strategy: questioning how MAGA Inc. spent $200 million, criticizing the redistricting effort he personally backed, reevaluating candidate selections.

Thus the senators fault the advisers, the advisers fault one another, and the president faults the advisers as well as the senators. One person described the result to Reuters as “a circular firing squad.” What nobody in this arrangement ever does is say that the man who made the decision made a bad one. Poor advice is the administration’s grammar: a manner of speaking in which mistakes occur without anyone making them.

A courtier cannot say that the king is incorrect, only that he was poorly informed, which leaves open the possibility that the king’s favor will return. The reason given is, ultimately, a request to be permitted to remain at court.

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I recently wrote about individuals in my former industry who send me private messages agreeing with me and then praise Trump publicly. The quiet agreers desire recognition for knowing better without incurring the cost of stating so. The poor-advice line is the elected version of the same move. It is disagreement designed to cost nothing: aimed at people the public can’t name, about decisions everyone knows the president made, phrased in a way that preserves the speaker’s standing with the man responsible.

It does not even work. Following Salazar’s ad airing, Trump stated that he merely disagreed with her, and she characterized their conversation as “courteous.” A week later he was amplifying posts calling for her to be replaced. Tillis has criticized the “amateurs” around the president since last year, and Trump referred to him as “weak and ineffective“ nonetheless. The device shields the speaker from nothing, since Trump comprehends perfectly well what it means. He is aware that the advisers are being held responsible for his decisions. He is aware of it because they are his decisions.

What the device actually achieves is something different. It informs voters that the war, the tariffs, and the raids are not the president’s policy but rather a series of unfortunate personnel mistakes that a few dismissals could rectify, which is the same reassurance the myth of the benevolent tsar provided to the peasants: that the person at the top is on their side, and that someone else is at fault. Every senator who uses it is telling their constituents that the president would do right by them if only he were aware.

He is aware. He essentially told us that he is the one who makes the decision. At the very least, his party can believe him.

Go Deeper into the Circus

Every so often, I get a message on X or LinkedIn from someone in Silicon Valley who wants me to know that they quietly agree with me. They read the essays and think I’m right about Trump, right about Musk, right about what has happened to the industry, but they can’t say so, because of their job, or their equity, or the general mood. I won’t respond to these messages, since the people who send them aren't my allies. They are cowards who need someone who bears the cost of stating it openly to inform them that consenting in private means something. It does not.

I know how the industry used to sound. I spent my entire career in it, helped build Cash App, and noticed the recruiters ceased calling once I began expressing what I thought about the new regime. On January 30, 2017, ten days into Trump’s first term, as many as 2,000 Google employees walked out of their offices to protest his ban on travelers from seven Muslim-majority countries. Sergey Brin, who arrived in this country as a refugee from the Soviet Union, spoke to the crowd. Thus did Sundar Pichai, who informed them “the fight will continue.” Nobody at that gathering appeared concerned that expressing what they believed would cost them anything. It had been that culture. Individuals in tech discussed politics openly, during lunch, on mailing lists, at all-hands meetings, and executives debated alongside them.

Nearly a decade later, Pichai was positioned on the inaugural platform directly behind Trump’s family, and Google had provided $1 million to the inaugural fund. It turned out that the fight would not go on.

The employees hadn’t altered their opinions. In 2024, approximately 95 percent of Apple staff members’ contributions to federal candidates went to Democrats, similarly 91.5 percent at Meta and roughly 83 percent at Amazon. Alphabet staff and their relatives provided Harris nearly 40 times what they provided Trump. Their names and employers are listed in federal filings that anybody can access. They will write a check against him. What they will no longer do is utter a statement against him where their supervisors can hear it. In an industry where virtually everyone freely expressed their political opinions, a culture of apprehension has emerged, and this apprehension did not originate at the lower levels.

Begin with Mark Zuckerberg, as he provided the most clear record. On January 7, 2021, the day after the attack on the Capitol, he wrote that Trump intended “to undermine the peaceful and lawful transition of power” to his elected successor, and suspended him from Facebook and Instagram. Donald Trump sued. Four years afterward, Meta consented to pay $25 million in order to settle the suit, along with $22 million going to Trump’s presidential library. Meta acknowledged no wrongdoing. Trump signed the agreement in the Oval Office. Nothing had changed regarding what Zuckerberg saw on January 6. Merely Trump’s stance had shifted, and thus Zuckerberg compensated him.

Tim Cook donated $1 million to the inaugural fund out of his own pocket. In August 2025 he was in the Oval Office and gave Trump a disc of Corning glass mounted on a 24-karat gold base that was engraved. “It’s a unique unit of one,” Cook said. At this event, Trump promoted a planned 100 percent tariff on imported chips and stated that “the good news for companies like Apple” was that companies constructing in the United States would pay nothing. I previously wrote about the dinner where they toasted him roughly a month later. The gold served as the overture.

Next came the ballroom. Trump dismantled the East Wing of the White House in October 2025 to construct a ballroom funded by private donors, and this month a list obtained by The Washington Post revealed figures beside the names: $25 million from Apple, $25 million from Nvidia, $10 million each from Microsoft and Palantir, $5 million each from Meta and Amazon. Google‘s stake emerged from the resolution of Trump’s lawsuit against YouTube, which targeted $22 million toward the ballroom’s construction. Richard Painter, the former chief ethics attorney for George W. Bush’s White House, put it simply: “These corporations all want something from the government.”

None of that remained concealed. Those individuals were not sneaking into the court. They declared their arrival, posed in front of the cameras, and submitted the paperwork.

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It is worthwhile examining the company they paid to retain. Sohrab Ahmari, having spent years engaged in discussions with JD Vance and served as an adviser, released a map of the emerging Republican coalition this week. There exist, he noted, five factions: restorationists, tech accelerationists, populists, Christian nationalists, and “common good” advocates. Vance is the sole figure who can unite them, and the issue that unites them is “reversing mass migration.” In the accompanying essay, Ahmari explicitly states that one of the gaps Vance can fill is the one “between populists and Big Tech,” and he cites Vance describing immigration restriction as the “tech-forward” stance.

So there it is, drawn by a friendly hand, with my former industry on the list as a member. A decrepit alliance of the worst elements of our troubled society: restorationists yearning for an era that never was, theocrats who believe the Constitution is a version of Leviticus, grievance merchants, and accelerationists who want to replace the state with a startup, all united by one common goal, which is to force some of the individuals who already reside here to depart. Ahmari himself moved to this nation from Tehran at thirteen, on a green card, having left a theocracy behind. He currently speaks favorably of a coalition that comprises Christian nationalists and is centered on shutting the door he walked through.

A coalition such as this is something a troubled society generates when the one thing its factions have in common is a list of individuals they want removed. And the men who run the most valuable companies on earth have been writing it checks.

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The thing about cowardice is that it usually appears reasonable from within. The pressure on those men was actually real. Trump had spent years threatening Apple with tariffs and once called for a boycott of its products, and he had sued Meta and YouTube over his suspensions. A nervous investor might explain precisely why Cook brought the gold and Zuckerberg paid the $25 million, and each reason would be a financial reason. That is what cowardice is: the sensible thing to do when you are afraid and someone else will bear the cost of your safety.

The genuine supporters of Ahmari’s coalition, at least, believe in something. Regardless of what you think about a Christian nationalist, he is not involved for a tariff exemption. The executives fare worse, since they do not believe any of it. They joined the dregs for a dismissed lawsuit and a carve-out on chips, and they did it with other people’s money. When an employee keeps their opinion to themselves in order to protect their mortgage, they are a willing serf. When the individual at the head of the company pays homage to safeguard his market capitalization, he becomes a willing vassal, and he makes the decision for everyone below him. I have previously discussed the economic royalists and the individuals who believe a satellite company is too big to nationalize: those who refer to capitalism as the ultimate American ideal and then give the state’s most hazardous occupant whatever he requests, and label the protection money a fundamental principle.

I won’t display empathy towards them. I’ve heard the claim that they had no option, and I don’t accept it, because the individuals with the least power in this story are the ones who still make the decision the executives would not. The engineer that signs a public letter, the employee who posts under their own name, the founder who declines the dinner invitation: each one of them has less to fall back on than Tim Cook.

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Administrations come to an end. Coalitions held together by an enemy turn on each other once the enemy is gone, and when this one does, the executives will be the easiest people in it to blame, because they never believed in any faction’s cause. They possess no principles to fall back on, only their names recorded. There are going to be oversight hearings, depositions, memoirs, and historians, and each one of them will possess the ballroom list. Their children will be able to read it. The record does not lapse, and they input every line of it personally.

When that day arrives, the individuals who attempted to purchase our democracy and establish a permanent oligarchy for themselves and their prostrate followers will be relying heavily on libertarian propaganda to portray themselves as victims of an authoritarian populist mob. Then we’ll display pictures of Alex Pretti and Renee Good. Good was a mother of three, shot in her vehicle by a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent in Minneapolis on January 7. Pretti served as a nurse in intensive care at the city’s VA hospital, shot seventeen days later by a Border Patrol agent. Both were United States citizens, and both were fatally shot by agents of the government whose ballroom these individuals had paid for.

Whether any of these payments violated a law is an issue for investigators and the courts, with evidence and due process, and I want this question asked. The alternative verdict does not require a court. Free people are entitled to decide whose company they keep, whose products they champion, and whose names they are willing to stand beside. This judgment may be given now.

The thing about cowardice is that it gets taught. At that rally in 2017, nobody seemed fearful. The engineer who sends me a personal message today was taught to be fearful by observing the men at the top of his industry lining up behind Trump’s family, settling his lawsuits, and funding his ballroom. He learned the lesson they were imparting: keep your head lowered, and pay whoever holds the position of authority. Cowardice near the top of an industry does not remain there.

Go Deeper into the Circus

I was informed of numerous things about capitalism this week. I said on X that I support nationalizing SpaceX because Musk is running his own private foreign policy with Starlink, and that this is my entire justification. What returned was a catechism. Capitalism accounted for his success. Capitalism guarantees the United States’ ongoing prosperity. Private property rights are essentially sacrosanct, and “asset seizure in one persons concept of ‘the national interest’ is a fundamentally communist concept.” Starlink is basically “a commercial network with a TOS agreement, just like any digital service you subscribe to.” The company is simply too big to nationalize anyway, so I ought to stop yelling. One man inquired if I’d like to seize the means of production, and added a smirk so I’d know he was the amusing one.

None of them addressed the argument, which fits in a sentence. When a business becomes critical infrastructure, its relationship with society alters. If SpaceX builds a near-monopoly on satellite internet, no matter how objectively good the product is, and its CEO then uses it to conduct foreign policy according to his own politics and against the interests of the United States, the company has violated the public trust. Full stop.

Starlink is a technological accomplishment, and I have always said as much. It functions approximately two-thirds of all active satellites in orbit, more than all other operators combined, and in one quarter last year it accounted for 97% of satellite internet speed tests worldwide. Ukraine runs its drones on it. This is what critical infrastructure entails. It is the thing individuals cannot do without, and the moment they cannot do without it, the person who owns it holds their lives in his hands whether he requested that responsibility or not.

On October 14, he shut his hand. The military-grade version of Starlink that Ukraine depends on had its speeds limited, so that any drone flying faster than 100 miles an hour lost its connection. According to The Wall Street Journal, Musk himself imposed the limits, after he had discussed Ukraine with Trump, and officials disagree on whether he acted alone or consulted with the administration first. Its journalists discovered a Ukrainian unit that dispatched six drones to a Russian army warehouse. One hit the warehouse. The commander stated that his drones now have to fly slower, and the Russians are bringing more of them down. Each Ukrainian drone that falls means a Russian warehouse remains standing, or a Russian drone that gets through to a Ukrainian apartment block.

The defenders continue to reach for the same phrase. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said Washington had not cut Ukraine’s access, and pointed instead to the terms of service Kyiv needed to comply with. My response guy stated similarly: a commercial network with a TOS agreement. This is the private foreign policy, put simply by the individuals who claim it doesn’t exist. Whether Ukrainian drones reach their targets is now a question of contract compliance, adjudicated by a billionaire who has complained about Ukraine’s strikes on Russian refineries. I view that as a betrayal of American interests, and the American public, which sides with Ukraine over Russia 57% to 4%, seems not to disagree. My previous essay discussed the finger-pointing among Musk, Rubio and Trump that followed. The fog does not affect whoever had his hand on the switch.

One person asked if I would also like to nationalize Microsoft, since the Pentagon operates on its software. As of this writing, Microsoft seems not to be pursuing an independent foreign policy in the conduct of a foreign war. The test was not about size or success or whether I liked the CEO. It is whether a private owner has taken something the public cannot do without and made it an instrument of his own will. The concept is much older than any of us. When the Supreme Court allowed Illinois to regulate Chicago’s grain elevators in 1877, it stated that property used in a manner affecting “the community at large” becomes “clothed with a public interest.” Generations of Americans grasped this without needing it explained. It took a generation brought up on Ayn Rand and a podcast microphone to forget this.

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I find it hard to be only angry at the men in my replies, because some of what I feel is pity. They talk about capitalism the way earlier Americans spoke of liberty, as the thing the country is for. However, capitalism is a system where the owners of capital retain their profits and invest them in additional capital, which can be beneficial and has never been a justification to exist. You won’t find it in the Declaration of Independence or the Preamble, which speak of justice, the common welfare and the blessings of liberty. These individuals have taken a mechanism and constructed a church around it, and the deity of the church is a man who has informed them that most people “unthinkingly believe whatever their political tribe tells them to believe. Like an NPC in a video game.” They are defending, without pay and with genuine emotion, his right to determine which Ukrainians get to defend themselves. They picture themselves in the cabin with him. He would throw them out the airlock on the way to Mars to conserve oxygen, and he would not pause to watch.

The worship is worst in my own field, among individuals who should know better. Engineers who would never allow a colleague to merge code without review regard his posts as revealed truth. Founders and investors fill their timelines with tributes to his brilliance, as if proximity might rub off. Jack Dorsey, who co-founded Twitter, responded to Musk’s deal to purchase it by labeling him “the singular solution I trust.” This is the parasocial devotion of a teenager to a pop star, exhibited by grown men with board seats, and it concludes the way those devotions always conclude. The star never learned their names.

Among these are the anarcho-capitalists, who envision companies as private empires situated alongside nation-states, and they are simply fools. They read The Sovereign Individual and decided that a person with enough satellites is a country. The Kingdom of Property operates on this fantasy, and it necessitates not recognizing where the empire’s money originated. SpaceX drew more than 80% from government contracts in the early 2020s. Their self-made sovereign is a defense contractor. Even the sovereign individual has always had a licensing department.

Nor do they object to the state owning companies, so long as the correct president does so. When Trump took a 9.9% stake in Intel through executive action and boasted that the country paid nothing for it, I don’t remember a single one of them warning that America was finished. They referred to it as dealmaking, which indicates their faith in property is negotiable and their loyalty to Musk remains unwavering.

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Regarding the law, it is not complex. The Fifth Amendment allows private property to be “taken for public use“ with just compensation. Madison drafted it in 1789, decades before Marx was born, so the communism charge says more about the reading habits of the man making it than about the idea. It would require an act of Congress, a reasonable price paid to shareholders and courts to resolve the disputes. Due process, the thing that these men claim to cherish, is the whole mechanism. And when they warn that Republicans will win again someday and be in control of it, they have stumbled upon the point. Power held by an elected government shifts when the public alters its mind. Power held by Musk is transferred when Musk dies, and not prior.

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I wrote back to one of them that once people’s lives depend on a thing, the person who built it does not get to say it is theirs to do with as they want. You exist within a society. When your decisions result in people being killed, the rest of us have a right to intervene. This is the argument. They respond to a different question, the one regarding envy, because envy is the sole motive they can envision for wanting something to be shared.

What they refer to as the end of America is the end of an exemption. For twenty years they have been informed that their talent positioned them above the usual obligations, that the producers are natural rulers and the rest of us are freeloaders waiting to take what they built. They have confused the indulgence of a country with its foundation. The country was founded on the opposite idea, that no man’s private power is beyond the reach of the public’s claim on him. When we take our country back, I intend to see that idea honored, and I expect the men in my replies to discover they were never in the cabin at all.

Go Deeper into the Circus

The president and vice president of the United States spent February 28, 2025, berating the leader of a country fighting to survive, and that day I wrote that this was an emergency. “Not just emergency. Catastrophe.” Congress, I argued, ought to begin emergency impeachment proceedings “as if the lives of their own children depend on it.” Within six weeks I was writing about the time of monsters and about the friends and relatives who had begun to suspect I was turning into an unhinged paranoiac. That essay was cautious almost to a fault: I wrote that I was making no prediction of war, merely reading heightened risk off conditions anyone could observe, and that those who brushed it aside were showing a familiar, well-studied case of normalcy bias.

Steve Witkoff met Vladimir Putin for the ninth time on Wednesday, at the Constantine Palace just outside St. Petersburg, where he thanked the Russian leader for freeing Stephen Hubbard, a 74-year-old American teacher whom Moscow had held for more than four years on what the State Department called fabricated charges. A hostage was taken, kept four years, then returned, and for that the American envoy bowed. “You talk so much about my president, President Trump, being a humanitarian,” Witkoff told a man whose army has shelled Ukrainian apartment blocks and carried off Ukrainian children for four and a half years. Then he added, “You are a humanitarian also, sir.”

Surprise would be a pose, and I will not strike it. These chickens have come home to roost on the complacency of a nation that was shown, clearly and again and again, exactly what was in front of it.

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Begin with the past two months. Trump signed the Lindsey O. Graham Sanctioning Russia and Iran Act in September, a law the Senate had approved 86 to 11 to honor a senator who was fresh back from Ukraine when he died in July. Having signed his dead friend’s law, he hollowed it out. A Russian diesel purchase came first, one that Foreign Policy said “sharply undercuts” the statute, followed by an executive order that spared Russia the sanctions entirely. Over those same weeks the satellite network Ukraine relies on to shoot Russian drones out of the sky was slowed, and at times the administration held back real-time intelligence about Russian strikes on the way.

After that he let us hear his view. “Russia, frankly, has been fine on Ukraine,” he said this week. “They haven’t been doing much.” As the words left his mouth, Russian missiles were hitting Ukrainian power plants. By Tuesday he had turned his fire on the victim. “Zelenskyy has to want to settle this war,” he said, “and if he doesn’t, I think it’s going to be a very bad thing.” Going back to the ambush of February 2025, he claimed Zelensky could have gotten a “better deal” at the time, as if being humiliated in the Oval Office had been a generous offer. Putin, meanwhile, is angling for a summit in China next month with Trump and Xi Jinping to wrap up the war, according to The Atlantic, “without having a seat at the table for Ukraine.” Zelensky’s answer took five words: “Nothing about Ukraine without Ukraine.”

Reading this takes no special skill. Trump and his people regard Ukraine as an obstacle and want it cleared, since money waits on the far side. Moscow has never been subtle about its pitch. The Wall Street Journal reported last year that the Kremlin had sold the White House on peace through business, with the president and his envoy signed on. In February The Economist reported that Russia had drawn up what it called “the Greatest Deal” for Trump, featuring Arctic oil and gas, rare-earth mines and a tunnel beneath the Bering Strait, while Zelensky, drawing on Ukrainian intelligence, valued the offers at $12 trillion. Kirill Dmitriev, Putin’s investment envoy, called that figure a fake. So be it. Discount the number. All of Russia produces roughly $2.5 trillion a year. When a nation dangles deals several times the size of its own output, it is working a con, and the mark is a man who has always been sure his next deal will be the largest anyone has ever seen. Gullibility and narcissism are, in Trump, a single flaw with two names, and Putin has been playing on it for ten years.

Then the fog arrived. On Monday I wrote about Musk pinning the Starshield slowdown on the president while the president pinned it on no one. According to Musk, any speed limits were the military’s call and “ultimately POTUS.” Rubio said “It sort of happened,” insisted that Starshield “has nothing to do with Ukraine,” and a few days later conceded that Ukraine “has benefited from it.” Monday brought Trump’s claim that he did not know who was responsible. Tuesday brought a Wall Street Journal report, sourced to US officials, that Musk himself ordered the slowdown and talked it over with Trump by phone shortly after it went public. Come Wednesday, Rubio was describing the call as one for SpaceX and Musk to make, and whether the White House had advance knowledge as “irrelevant.” Pete Hegseth, the defense secretary, pointed at SpaceX. Each version of events has its own author, and each author turns out to be the one party who bears no responsibility.

I cannot see an accident in any of this. To my eye it is deliberate, the Kremlin’s playbook run from Washington: flood the public with so many conflicting stories that no one can work out what happened, then wait for attention to drift. Did Moscow coach them? It would not surprise me, though coaching was hardly necessary. These men have been fluent in this dialect for years.

Back in April 2025, I laid out a feedback loop. Economic hardship produced by nationalist policy, I argued, gets felt as proof of a grievance instead of as a failure of policy, and “economic pain leads not to policy reconsideration but to doubling down.” My subject then was tariffs. Which shock came next I could not say; what I could see was that the machine for converting each shock into the following one had already been assembled and turned on.

Exactly one year after the Oval Office meeting, on February 28, 2026, the United States and Israel began striking Iran, and the wider war that followed strangled shipping in the Strait of Hormuz. In September diesel reached a record $6.53 a gallon, and Moody’s Analytics puts the war’s cost to the average American household at almost $2,000. Rather than rethink the war, the administration went looking for diesel, and Moscow had some to sell. According to The New York Times, the sanctions waivers were a last-ditch effort to push fuel prices down ahead of the midterms, and Trump is now “explicitly seeking economic support from Russia.” One war’s bill, then, is being settled by deserting the people who fight the other, and those presenting the invoice to Kyiv are the same men who launched the war that ran it up.

Midterm panic should not be confused with concern for the Republican Party. Trump’s interest in the party reaches precisely as far as its usefulness as a shield, and at the moment that means through November. The fate of the party after him, or of the country after him, has never figured in his arithmetic, and the past twenty months offer no sign it ever will.

Seen from within, this is how the time of monsters looks. It unfolds as a chain of decisions instead of a single event that everyone recognizes together, each one marketed as pragmatic, each one shrinking the choices for the one after, until an American envoy is praising a kidnapper of children as a humanitarian and an American president is naming the kidnapper’s victim as the obstacle to peace.

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Ignorance was never the cause of the complacency. The information was there for anyone who cared to look. What was missing was the will to treat an emergency as an emergency, and normalcy bias names that missing will: the belief that tomorrow will resemble yesterday, that institutions will survive because they always have, that somebody will eventually intervene. What I wrote about in The Politics of Nothing Can Be Done as inevitability, normalcy bias acts out over dinner at home. Here is depoliticization working upward from below. No one needs to inform the public that nothing can be done, since the public informs itself each time it concludes the alarm is most likely a drill.

Among elected officials the problem is worse, since they hold tools the rest of us do not. Six Republican senators put their names to a letter calling the diesel deal “a gift to our adversary and a betrayal of our Allies.” Days afterward, when Ukraine disclosed that it could no longer stop Russian drones, many of the conference’s loudest champions of Ukraine stayed silent. The most forceful Republican voice has belonged to Thom Tillis, who is not running for re-election, and that is hardly a coincidence. Most of the Republicans talking now have nothing left to lose, and letters are what they have to offer. Yet the Senate that approved the sanctions law 86 to 11 commands subpoenas, appropriations and enough votes to enforce its own statute. You send a letter once you have resolved to leave all of that unused.

And then comes Mitt Romney, who reappeared on X last week for the first time since July. “Abandon Ukraine and we abandon liberty,” he wrote. “Eventually even our own.” On Wednesday he likened Zelensky to Churchill and Washington, who could each have “done a deal.” Both are fine sentences, and the name of the man doing the abandoning appears in neither. A statement of principle with the guilty party’s name carefully omitted is the most Romney can muster. His saying it leaves me grateful and furious at once, because he grasped the stakes in 2024 and made the other choice. One month ahead of that election he said he did not want Trump as president and expected Trump would probably win, yet he declined to endorse the only candidate able to stop him, since he hoped to “continue to have a voice in the Republican Party” once it was over. Two months on he called the party shaped by Donald Trump now, and asked what lay ahead for him he replied “nothing.” He kept his voice in reserve for the party and then left it unspent for two years. The right words for that are cowardice and partisanship above country. So when a Republican friend says they long for a return to the party of Romney, remind them what that means: a party whose finest members saw this coming, said so with good manners, and got out of the way.

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As the walls close in, Trump will keep upping the ante, and the election itself is the next thing on the table. When Time asked him this month whether he might invoke the Insurrection Act around the midterms, he answered, “I don’t rule anything out or in,” and went on: “I could use it. A lot of people think I should use it sometimes.” Some of those people have names. In the Minneapolis protests earlier this year, after ICE officers killed Alex Pretti, Vice President JD Vance pressed him to invoke the act “to crush the unrest in Minnesota,” and Stephen Miller repeatedly pushed him to suspend habeas corpus for undocumented immigrants. Steve Bannon is urging him to “call up the 82nd and 101st Airborne” to “get around every poll.” Asked if he would refuse an order to station troops at polling places, Hegseth declined to answer. In Minneapolis it was optics rather than law that held the Insurrection Act back: one aide asked what it would gain them that justified the heat, and “Nobody had a good answer.” That is a flimsy barrier. In my judgment Trump is quite likely to try imposing martial law at some point, a power no president has under any statute, and I doubt the lack of authority will keep him from the attempt.

My expectation is that the Supreme Court would strike it down, and that it would do so for the wrong reason. This Court answers to capital before it answers to Trump. It struck down his emergency tariffs in February, and in June, by 5 to 4, it refused to let him fire Fed governor Lisa Cook, all while it upheld his other firings and tightened his hold over the remainder of the government. Threaten the markets and the justices discover a spine. Threaten only the voters and the record grows thinner, the rulings come after soldiers are already deployed, and an election cannot be rerun. Assuring yourself that the Court will stop him is just another way of assuring yourself that the institutions will hold, the very normalcy bias that has let this emergency run on for twenty months. A Court that protects the central bank might protect the ballot or might not, and no one should bet the midterms on learning which.

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Right now the pull is toward the vocabulary of endings, toward saying the cancer is terminal and the decline is settled, so that all that remains to ask is how long it will take. I feel that pull as strongly as anyone does. Yet it is the very move Monday’s essay went after, the forecast that frees everyone from the obligation to act. A prognosis is one thing and an emergency another. The entire point of declaring an emergency is that the outcome remains open, and that what comes next turns on what people choose to do.

For twenty months Zelensky has heard that the numbers have already delivered their verdict, that Russia has more soldiers, that America has lost interest, that the sensible course is to sign. Again and again he rejects the forecast. At the very least the rest of us can stop treating the survival of his country as weather.

February 2025 was an emergency, April was too, and so is now; what has changed is only that those who called me paranoid can see it as well. I wrote then that we needed action “now. Not in four years.” Nearly half of those four years are gone.

Go Deeper into the Circus

Politico marked the night after the 2024 count with a story whose headline read “I think it’s over”. One person spoke the words, though nearly every professional explainer of elections would have signed them. Within weeks the gloom had been promoted into a theory. Trump’s Latino gains, Politico now reported, were “upending the American political map,” a…

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Tell people that materialism cannot be true and they usually hear one of two things. One group hears a confession of faith wearing philosophical clothes, an argument whose last move will be a soul, an afterlife or a God who listens to prayer. The other hears someone who has failed to notice how much has been explained by physics, chemistry and neuroscience. I mean neither, and the gap between what I mean and what is heard is wide enough that I want the argument laid out whole, if only to see for myself which parts bear weight and which do not.

Monism is my starting point. Reality, on my view, is one, and consciousness, whatever it turns out to be, is neither a ghost in a machine nor some substance imported from elsewhere. I also reject the supernatural, if the word names a second order of being that intrudes on nature and overrides its regularities, and I refuse the suggestion that giving up materialism obliges me to accept anything of the kind. That suggestion is among the most effective bits of framing in modern thought. Offer only two choices, matter or magic, and any case against materialism turns into a case for magic, so that the materialist wins without having to argue. Elsewhere I have described the binary as a stage on which both sides perform, and explained why even a nontheistic metaphysics owes nothing to physicalism. Two choices was always one too few. A third exists, and it has a long history.

Einstein’s view was near to it. In 1929 Rabbi Herbert Goldstein asked him whether he believed in God, and his cabled answer was that he believed “in Spinoza’s God”, the God revealed in the orderly harmony of what exists, and not one occupied with the fates and doings of human beings. Spinoza’s God has no personality and does not interfere; it is the single substance of which all things are modes. On mind and body, his core claim is that we have one thing grasped two ways, not two things acting on each other. Part II of the Ethics compresses this into one sentence: the order and connection of ideas is the same as the order and connection of things. Extension is not caused by thought, nor thought by extension. Their parallel course follows from their being, at root, the same.

What the cable licenses is narrower than it may appear. We learn from it that the twentieth century’s most celebrated physicist saw nothing unscientific in a non-materialist monism. We do not learn that he would have endorsed my objections to materialism, and I have no intention of enlisting him in arguments he never made. The cable does show that nobody who thought seriously about physics was ever compelled to choose between matter and magic. Spinoza’s view, along with the dual-aspect monism I regard as its modern heir, treats the physical and the experiential as two aspects of one underlying order, neither of which reduces to the other and neither of which is supernatural.

The question Goldstein asked Einstein is one monism has made me answer differently too. These days I am readier than I once was to allow that a God exists. Monism raises God’s plausibility for me and puts me squarely among the agnostics. Rather than disproving God, materialism barred the question from the outset, because if the physical aspect is everything, reality has nothing mind-like at its foundation. Monism removes the bar while leaving the question open. Should experience be part of the fundamental order instead of a latecomer in complicated matter, we may reasonably ask whether the whole has an inside, and that I am not yet able to answer. Nor would a Spinozist God count as supernatural in the sense I reject, since it would simply be nature taken whole. The argument below is thus neither apologetics nor an atheist’s case.

God, moreover, names two separate questions, and they point in different directions. Nothing in monist metaphysics excludes a God who made the cosmos we live in. Plato’s Timaeus offers one in its divine craftsman, who forms our world imposing order on chaotic materials instead of producing it out of nothing. Such a maker would be one subject inside the single order, bound by the conditions it imposes, and so a God with limits. A dual-aspect monist can accommodate that God as a further standpoint alongside the others, whatever its power. Treating God as the ground of reality is another matter entirely. Were a mind the very reason there is an order at all, the experiential aspect would take priority over the physical, which is idealism, not dual-aspect monism. Neither claim is mine. Still, if I came to believe in a God of the second kind, I would shift toward idealism, and the monism defended here would have to yield.

For now, dual-aspect monism is where I argue from. According to materialism, the physical aspect is everything: what physics describes, or would describe once complete, exhausts reality, and consciousness either is some physical process or is an illusion one generates. My case against this comes in two parts. First, materialism contradicts itself, since it adopts as its criterion of truth a standpoint nobody has occupied or ever could. Second, the program erected on that standpoint is not converging. Its own assumptions predict that open questions should be dwindling, and instead they are proliferating.

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A distinction I have relied on for years comes before the contradiction: method is not metaphysics. Science disciplines belief against error. Its technique is to isolate whatever can be measured, repeated and shared, and to set aside whatever differs between one observer and another. Its power comes from that bracketing. But bracketing is a choice, and choosing what an inquiry will ignore does not amount to discovering that the ignored thing is absent.

We know when the choice was made and who made it. Galileo, in The Assayer of 1623, drew a line that physics has observed ever since. We must think of a material body, he writes, as possessing shape, size, place and motion, yet the mind is under no compulsion to think of it as white or red, bitter or sweet. Tastes, odors and colors, he decides, are “no more than mere names” as far as the object goes, and they exist only in consciousness. Take away the living creature and those qualities vanish, leaving shapes, numbers and motions behind.

Color, taste and sound went unexplained by Galileo. He moved them instead, from the object into the mind, and then constructed a science of objects that was excused from accounting for them. The move was brilliant, since it allowed mathematics to take hold of nature without being held back by the qualitative grain of experience. Yet it left a bill for later. Physics set the qualities of experience aside exactly so that it could get on without them, and so it is in no position to declare afterwards that it has explained them, or that they amount to nothing beyond the shapes, numbers and motions it retained. Exclusion was the founding act of the method. What a method excluded at its founding, it cannot later prove to be nothing but the remainder it kept.

Usually the materialist replies that scientific success entitles us to extrapolate. In The Moon Does Not Prove Physicalism I dismantled that reply, and the gist is this: when a rocket reaches the Moon, what is confirmed is the physics used to build and guide the rocket. Nothing further follows about whether matter produces consciousness. The success belongs to the job the method was built for. Extrapolating from it quietly assumes that what the method set aside is the same sort of thing as what it captured, and that assumption is the entire dispute.

So to the contradiction. Third-person description is not, for materialism, merely a tool. It is the yardstick of the real. On this view a fact counts as objective when it would hold for any observer, or for none, so that it describes the world from no particular vantage. Anything that cannot be caught from that vantage gets demoted to appearance, to how things seem to beings such as ourselves. Thomas Nagel gave the ideal its name in The View from Nowhere, and the materialist hopes to describe the world from that nowhere and afterwards slot the observers in as objects inside the description.

Nowhere, though, is not a place one can stand. Each observation in the scientific record was made by somebody, at some place and time. A dial shows a reading only once someone sees it, and a measurement turns into data only when it is noticed, written down and understood. Arthur Eddington grasped this in The Nature of the Physical World in 1928 when he remarked that exact science has as its entire subject matter “pointer readings and similar indications.” Such readings are delivered to nobody from nowhere. They come in experience, to a subject, and all objective knowledge is assembled out of agreement between first-person reports. Wherever we have actually achieved objectivity, it has been a convergence of perspectives, never their absence.

This is the sense in which I call the third-person standpoint phenomenologically impossible. It is not just that we have so far failed to get there. Observation is itself a standpoint, so the idea of observing from none makes no sense. Every datum the materialist uses is borrowed from first-person experience, and the picture built from those data is then used to pronounce first-person experience derivative, illusory, or nothing beyond the picture. Away goes the ladder, though it was the ladder keeping the building up.

Few people did more to construct the quantum mechanics that materialists now invoke than Erwin Schrödinger, and he saw the problem as one of method. In Mind and Matter he set out what he named the principle of objectivation: “we exclude the Subject-of-cognizance from the domain of nature that we endeavour to understand,” withdrawing into the role of a spectator who is not part of the world, which thereby becomes an objective one. This, he said, was a simplification we adopt in order to master a problem of impossible intricacy, and he went on to name its cost. Once we have taken ourselves out of the picture, we reinsert ourselves as just another object, and what follows, as he tells it, is a series of unbearable antinomies, above all our futile hunt for the point at which mind acts on matter. Naturally that point eludes us. The material world was built by removing the mind, and a picture drawn on the condition that the mind be absent cannot contain it.

Here, then, is the contradiction in the words of one of the physics’ founders. Nobody is being called dishonest, and objectivity is not being called a sham. As a procedure, objectivation is legitimate and immensely fruitful. Contradiction enters only once the procedure is elevated into an ontology, and the spectator who left the world for reasons of method is informed that he was never in it.

From the opposite side, Nagel reached the same point in “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?”, published in 1974. His argument was that an organism is conscious if and only if there is something it is like to be it, and that this subjective character slips through every reductive analysis available, since each is logically compatible with its absence. The diagnosis concerned structure. Each subjective phenomenon is bound to one point of view, and an objective, physical theory seems bound to abandon that point of view. A method that operates by giving up the point of view has no way to recover what essentially belongs to one. Gathering more data changes nothing, because the trouble is the form of the instrument, not a lack of evidence.

Physics supplies a further twist. Bertrand Russell and Eddington each observed that physics characterizes the world through structure and dynamics, that is, through how things relate and how those relations alter. In the account given by the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, this is a structuralist picture in which physics says nothing about what underlies the structure and dynamics it describes. Mass is fixed by how something resists acceleration and draws other masses toward it, and charge by how it couples to fields. Every property is given by what it does relative to the rest, and not one by what it is intrinsically.

My own name for this elsewhere is the principle that description is not exhaustion: to say what a thing does is not thereby to say what it is. That matters a great deal to the materialist, whose claim is precisely that physics says what everything is. If what physics actually supplies is how things behave toward each other, then saying consciousness is “nothing but” physical stuff lacks definite content. Nothing but which stuff? Of matter we know the relational profile in exquisite detail, and its intrinsic nature in a single case, our own experience, in which we meet a portion of the world from within. The dual-aspect monist’s conclusion, drawn with care, is that experience is the inside of what physics describes from outside, and that neither perspective is complete.

Dual-aspect monism is not proved by any of this. What is shown is that the materialist has taken for granted a concept of the physical that physics itself does not provide. The third-person picture is the view from outside, and a view from outside has, by its very construction, no inside. Inferring from this that no inside exists mistakes the boundaries of a method for the boundaries of the world.

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Neuroscience’s habits of speech display the contradiction on a small scale. Pick up a popular book about the brain, or quite a few technical ones, and the brain turns out to see, choose, believe, predict, desire and deceive us. In 2003 the neuroscientist Max Bennett and the philosopher Peter Hacker brought out Philosophical Foundations of Neuroscience, an extended charge sheet against that habit. Psychological predicates that hold of human beings as wholes, they argue, cannot intelligibly be ascribed to parts of them such as the brain. They named the mistake the mereological fallacy, after the Greek word for part. Seeing and deciding are done by people. People need brains in order to see and decide, yet a brain does not see any more than a leg walks.

They drew their examples from the field’s most eminent figures, among them Francis Crick, Antonio Damasio and David Marr. Writing in Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews, the reviewer summed up the accusation: the Cartesian mind had not been eliminated but moved, by “replacing the ethereal by grey glutinous matter.” A neuroscientist who says the brain builds a model of the world and then consults it has installed a little person in the skull, handed it a model to inspect, and labelled the little person a brain.

Replies came from Daniel Dennett and John Searle in the 2007 book Neuroscience and Philosophy. According to Dennett, neuroscientists employ these predicates in an “attenuated” sense everyone grasps, so that Bennett and Hacker were teaching their grandmother to suck eggs. Searle’s charge was that the two authors were confusing the rules for using the words with the ontology.

Dennett gives away more in that reply than he intended. Attenuated predicates make for attenuated explanations, and we are then entitled to ask what the full-strength sense is doing whenever such explanations are offered to the public as accounts of what seeing or believing really consists in. Shorthand is defensible only so long as somebody can redeem it, and redeeming it is exactly the step nobody has taken. Searle, for his part, was defending his own biological naturalism, according to which consciousness is a genuine first-person feature that cannot be eliminated. An eliminativist will find little comfort there.

Neuroscientists are not the only ones with the habit. In a recent passage, the philosopher Dan Williams writes of “a powerful but largely unconscious ‘social diffusion bias’” by which “our brains evaluate information.” The rest of his work is about the ways reputation, status and group loyalty shape what we believe, an account that is social rather than neural, and “our brains” is quite probably a figure of speech. Which is exactly my point. The figure arrives so easily that it goes unnoticed. Information is evaluated by people, in social contexts, for reasons. Hand the evaluating over to an organ and the person vanishes from the explanation, while the organ acquires the very mind it was meant to account for. In the mereological fallacy, the third-person contradiction becomes grammar: our whole vocabulary for consciousness was learned from within and applied to whole persons, and moving it onto their parts renders it incoherent while it goes on sounding scientific.

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My case’s second part is empirical, and it calls for more caution, since science always has open problems and a mere list of them proves nothing.

Stated exactly, the claim runs as follows. Were materialism true, and the method grounded in it tracking reality’s structure, the frontier ought to close as time passes. It need not close steadily, nor without surprises, but overall the territory of fundamental mystery should contract as instruments get better. What we find instead is that better data brings deeper questions, a number of them questions the framework never anticipated.

Take the brain first. How do features handled in separate regions, with color processed in one area and motion and shape in others, get joined into one unified experience? That is the binding problem, and decades of research later, “no complete model exists,” while one review chapter calls it “still unresolved.” Nowhere does the outside description meet the inside fact more directly. From within we know that experience is unified, more surely than we know any fact about neurons, whereas the outside description offers distributed processes. The unity is the thing to be explained, and no one has explained it.

A similar story comes from the most generously funded effort to test theories of consciousness head to head. Nature published in 2025 the results of an adversarial collaboration setting integrated information theory against global neuronal workspace theory, in which 256 participants were studied with functional imaging, magnetoencephalography and intracranial recordings. Some predictions of each theory were borne out, while the findings ended up substantially challenging key tenets of both. It is a candid and creditable result, and it portrays a field in which both of the leading theories were badly hurt the first time they met a carefully designed test.

Particle physics next. No theory in the history of science has been confirmed more precisely than the Standard Model, and with neutrinos treated as massless its dynamics rest on 19 parameters whose values are established by experiment, a figure that climbs to 26 when neutrino masses and mixing are added. Why those numbers have the values they do, the theory does not say. It accepts them as given. A program that aims to explain everything from the ground up, and whose ground consists of two dozen numbers it cannot explain, has less a foundation than a ledger of measurements it cannot account for.

Best known among those puzzles is the hierarchy problem, which asks why the Higgs boson is “a hundred million billion times less massive” than nature’s highest energy scales. Physicists expected for decades that new particles, supersymmetric ones above all, would show up at the Large Hadron Collider and restore what they call naturalness. None showed up. According to Quanta Magazine, the discipline had by 2016 entered a textbook Kuhnian crisis, and physicists have been reconsidering ever since the long-held assumption that big stuff consists of smaller stuff. Far from peripheral, that assumption simply is reductionism. Because the costliest experiment ever constructed failed to find what reductionist reasoning foretold, some of those who operate it now ask whether the world is assembled from parts in the manner the materialist picture supposes.

Gravity after that. Each of general relativity and quantum theory is magnificently confirmed within its own domain, yet the two will not fit together. Quantum gravity, in the description offered by the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, remains under construction more than a century on, with “no single, generally agreed-upon body of theory” and with neither principal research program yet shown to recover the world we observe at low energies. My own work argues that the obstacle is in part metaphysical, because the theories disagree on what time is, and one places the observer outside the system in a way the other cannot absorb. The Birmingham experiment discussed in The Eternal Now is a Laboratory Result, which reconstructed time from correlations within a system instead of importing it from outside, offers a small empirical clue to how that dispute may resolve. I treat it as a clue and nothing more.

Then cosmology, where anomalies keep coming in faster than the theory can digest them. Many expected the Hubble tension, the mismatch between the expansion rate measured nearby and the rate inferred from the early universe, to disappear once the James Webb Space Telescope tested whether crowded starfields had skewed the nearby measurements. Instead, by one recent account, Webb ruled out the crowding explanation and confirmed the higher number. The Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument collaboration then reported in 2025, on the basis of nearly 15 million galaxies and quasars, mounting evidence that dark energy has weakened over time. Should that stand, cosmology’s standard model, in which dark energy is a constant, will need revision at its base. Having written already about the state of cosmology and about the habit of deferring inconvenient observations to a scale not yet surveyed, I will observe only that the field now speaks of crisis where it once spoke of refinement.

Biology, finally, where reductionists expected form to follow once the genome had been read. Work in Michael Levin’s laboratory has shown that electrical potentials in cells outside the nervous system serve as instructive prepatterns for gene expression and morphogenesis, and that a planarian flatworm’s target body shape can be rewritten permanently without genomic editing or transgenes. Levin’s work contains nothing non-physical. Still, it is one more instance in which the explanatory level that counts proved to lie above the lowest, and in which the organism acts as a whole in ways its parts failed to predict.

No single result on this list refutes materialism. Materialist research programs are attached to every one of these problems, and some of them may succeed. The list reveals a trend instead. In foundational physics, in cosmology, in consciousness science and in developmental biology, ten years of improved instruments have generated more fundamental questions, not fewer, and a number of the costliest tests of reductionist expectation have returned negative. A framework that tracked reality’s deep structure should not, taken as a whole, generate that pattern. One would expect it from a framework excellent at one aspect of reality that is being driven into ground where that aspect has ceased to be the whole story.

Nor does evidence against materialism count, on its own, as evidence for the alternative I hold. Idealism is compatible with the same anomalies, as are various forms of neutral monism, some future physicalism quite unlike the present one, and simple ignorance. Non-convergence undermines the materialist’s confidence that the frontier will close on his terms, but it does not close the frontier on mine. Dual-aspect monism would be specifically favored by a prediction that its rivals do not make, and that work is under way elsewhere.

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Gödel came last on my list, and he gets a section to himself because no item is more easily misused.

Kurt Gödel showed in 1931 that every consistent formal system able to express basic arithmetic contains truths it cannot prove. J. R. Lucas, a philosopher, argued in 1961 in “Minds, Machines and Gödel” that the result shows the mind is no machine. The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy sets out the steps: a machine generating theorems of arithmetic can be represented by a formal system; a consistent system has a Gödel sentence, true yet unprovable inside it; anyone who understands the construction can see the sentence is true; hence that person is not that machine. Adding the sentence to the machine yields a new machine with its own Gödel sentence, and the person can always take one more step.

In Shadows of the Mind, published in 1994, Roger Penrose took up the argument and concluded that human mathematical understanding is non-computable, out of reach of any algorithm. Rather than inferring that the mind is immaterial, he infers that our physics is incomplete, and that we will need physics beyond computational simulation to understand consciousness. Together with the anesthesiologist Stuart Hameroff he built the Orch OR proposal, tying consciousness to a gravity-related collapse of quantum states inside neural microtubules. The pair’s 2014 review concludes that “consciousness plays an intrinsic role in the universe,” and Hameroff locates the precursors of experience in the fine-scale geometry of spacetime.

Penrose is hardly a figure on the margins. As a doctoral student under Dennis Sciama, Stephen Hawking built on Penrose’s singularity theorem, and later the two jointly proved the general theorem of 1970. Penrose shared the 2020 Nobel Prize in Physics for showing that general relativity robustly predicts black holes. So when he claims the mind is not an algorithm and that physics must change to make room for it, nobody can wave the claim away as a misunderstanding of physics or mathematics.

Contesting it is another matter, and since the conclusion suits me, the objections merit closer scrutiny, not looser. Consistency is the gravest issue: a Gödel sentence is assured of truth only when the system is consistent, and by Gödel’s second theorem no system can prove its own consistency. Whoever runs the argument must therefore know his own reasoning to be sound, the assumption David Chalmers singled out as its “greatest vulnerability.” Mathematicians err; a faulty proof of the four-color theorem survived for eleven years. Paul Benacerraf further suggested that a mind which is a formal system might be too complex for that mind to grasp, so that no one could ever write down its Gödel sentence. As for the physics, Max Tegmark computed in 2000 that microtubule coherence would decay in around 10⁻¹³ seconds, much too quickly to matter, to which Hameroff and his colleagues answered that he had modeled something other than their proposal. Chalmers also wondered why quantum processes should yield consciousness when classical ones do not, and proposed that Penrose may have “simply replaced one mystery with another.”

Describing the argument as “very controversial”, the encyclopedia stops short of calling it refuted. As I read the objections, they show that the argument does not prove the mind non-computable, and what remains after them is humbler yet adequate for what I need. Each of the logical objections suggests that our hold on mathematical truth may not be what it appears to be from within: perhaps we are inconsistent unawares, or running an algorithm too intricate to examine. Every one of them saves materialism by marking down first-person evidence. It seems to us that the Gödel sentence is true, and we are told the seeming may mislead. That is the same move the illusionist makes about consciousness generally, at the same price. The third-person picture is protected by casting doubt on the first-person evidence out of which it was constructed.

The point I make about Gödel is one Penrose defends, and he defends it as a physicist convinced that consciousness is physical. The argument’s most formidable living champion therefore sides with a physics not yet written, one in which mind belongs to reality instead of being something computation outputs. That is not my position, but it lives on the same street.

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From an unexpected quarter comes the second wing of the argument from authority. Panpsychism, the view that consciousness or something like it is a basic and pervasive feature of reality, is currently receiving some of its most serious attention from inside neuroscience.

Panpsychism is not my view. In its usual forms it gives the basic constituents of the physical world experiential properties of their own, and then runs into the combination problem, which asks how micro-experiences merge into a unified mind. That is binding again, moved over into metaphysics, and moving it does not make it easier. As I see it, experience is an aspect of one underlying order, its depth of inside-ness scaling with how recursively a system is organized, rather than a property scattered across the smallest pieces. Still, panpsychism sits close to monism. It shares my view that consciousness is no late by-product of complicated matter, and that the physical and the experiential have belonged to one reality from the beginning.

The plainest example is integrated information theory. Its developer was the neuroscientist and psychiatrist Giulio Tononi, and its champion Christof Koch, who was once president and chief scientist of the Allen Institute for Brain Science. On Tononi and Koch’s account, IIT regards consciousness as “an intrinsic, fundamental property of reality,” and Koch has described it as “a scientific, constructive, predictive and mathematically precise form of panpsychism” fit for the twenty-first century. Consciousness, he adds, “depends on a physical substrate but is not reducible to it,” which comes about as near to a dual-aspect formulation as a working neuroscientist is likely to get.

Of the two theories examined in the Templeton-funded adversarial collaboration mentioned earlier, a program that cost more than $6 million, IIT was one. The fiercest reaction against it likewise arose inside the field. During 2023, 124 researchers signed an open letter branding IIT pseudoscience, partly on account of its “panpsychist commitments,” and among the signatories were Adrian Owen, Chris Frith and Joseph LeDoux. Anil Seth, hardly a panpsychist sympathizer, defended the worth of wild ideas against the letter’s tone.

Neuroscience, in other words, is not so much warming to panpsychism as quarrelling over it, and the quarrel counts as evidence. Were the materialist answer settled in the field’s eyes, a rival would simply be ignored, not kept out by 124 signatures. Letters like that get written when a serious portion of a field no longer finds the default answer sufficient, and the remainder senses the ground shifting.

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Illusionism is the most formidable materialist answer to all of this. Keith Frankish, and Dennett before him, maintain that phenomenal consciousness, the felt quality of experience, does not exist, although it appears to. In the words of one recent defense, the position joins an “eliminative claim: phenomenal consciousness does not exist” to an appearance claim, that it nonetheless seems to. Dennett’s phrase for consciousness was a “user-illusion,” comparable to the desktop icons a naive user takes for the machine’s inner workings.

Consistency is illusionism’s strength. It takes the third-person standpoint as reality’s measure and follows that measure to the bottom: since the outside view contains no inside, there is none, and the impression of one is a representation the system generates about itself. I answer that an illusion is the way something seems to somebody, and that without a subject for whom the seeming happens the concept does not apply. Illusionists reply that the seeming may be construed functionally, as a tendency to form certain judgments, with nothing it is like to have that tendency. In that case, though, the theory has redefined the appearance in terms which, as Nagel pointed out, are logically compatible with its absence. Its starting datum is that there is something it is like to see red, its finishing theory says there is nothing it is like to see red, and the result is presented as an explanation of the datum.

History provides a second reply. Each era has had its open problems, the materialist observes, and each era’s critics have taken them for symptoms of failure. Lord Kelvin noticed two small clouds above nineteenth-century physics, which grew into relativity and quantum mechanics, both triumphs of physical explanation. What makes today’s clouds any different? One part of my reply is that Kelvin’s clouds really did overthrow the framework. Classical mechanics failed to survive them; what lived on was the method, and the physics that replaced the old was far odder, and far less hospitable to naive materialism, than Kelvin could have pictured. Quantum theory wrote measurement into the foundations of physics, and nobody has managed to erase it since. The analogy demonstrates that open problems resolve toward better physics, and better physics has again and again drifted away from the image of little objects in a container, watched from nowhere.

The third reply accuses me of borrowing the intuitive pull of the hard problem and labelling it a contradiction. A materialist may concede that data originate at the first-person standpoint and yet insist that what occupies the standpoint is a physical system, no more contradictory than a thermostat taking a measurement. That sentence, I grant, holds no formal contradiction. The contradiction sits in the completeness claim about third-person description. If a physical system observes, then there is a fact about how matters stand from its standpoint, and completeness holds that the third-person description of the system captures that fact. Here Nagel, Schrödinger and the structuralists meet: a description built by removing standpoints cannot be complete about standpoints. The materialist is free to abandon completeness, but at that point he is no longer a materialist of the kind I oppose, having become something nearer a dual-aspect monist who has not yet realized it.

⁂

A further consequence follows, and its target is organized religion, not materialism. Whatever God these terms allow must be either a limited creator inside the single order or a ground with no personhood. The God taught by most religious institutions, a personal being who is simultaneously the ground of all things, all-powerful and all-knowing, is precisely what the argument rules out. Were the institutions backed by their own scriptures and teachers, this would be merely a philosopher’s dispute with theology. Frequently they are not backed. Judged by religious teaching itself, the picture of God that organized religion offers deserves suspicion, and the evidence lies in the texts it venerates and the mystics it condemned.

Begin with the earliest stratum of Jewish scripture. Early Jewish scripture suggests a very limited God, one who takes human form and must make the physical journey to Sodom to check what he has heard. Three men come to Abraham’s tent in Genesis 18 and eat the food he offers, and before they depart YHWH declares “I will go down now, and see whether they have done altogether according to the cry of it”. The Babel story has the same shape, with the Lord who descended to see the city and the tower. In The Bodies of God and the World of Ancient Israel, Benjamin Sommer treats passages like these as remnants of a God possessing more than one body and fluid selves, an idea that biblical religion’s dominant currents later abandoned. Notice how the tradition handled them. Rashi, discussing Babel, explains that God “did not need to do this, except to teach judges not to condemn a defendant until they see” what is before them. According to the text, God went to inspect; according to the commentary, he never had to, and the trip becomes instruction for human judges. When doctrine and text conflicted, it was the reading that changed while the doctrine stayed put. The commentators deserve this much: the text is mixed, and the very chapter that dispatches God to Sodom has the visitor knowing that Sarah laughed inwardly. Even so, these stories give God a location: he is in a place, journeys, arrives and learns. Omniscience came later, once theology stripped God of every standpoint, in much the way physics after Galileo stripped out the observer, and theology did this in defiance of its own earliest scripture.

Hinduism, too, gives God many faces, and you are among them. In the Rig Veda, Indra, Mitra, Varuna and Agni appear as faces of one reality, in a verse commonly translated “Truth is one, sages call it by various names.” The schools part company over what this means for you, and they part along the same fork. For Advaita Vedanta the key text is Tat Tvam Asi in the Chandogya Upanishad, “That thou art,” whose “that” is the Existent, “the self of this whole world.” This time the critique is internal to the tradition, and stated in the open. Shankara treats the personal God of devotion, the one most worshippers pray to, as Brahman as it appears from the standpoint of ignorance, while your innermost self simply is Brahman, understood as pure consciousness. A towering teacher of the tradition places the God of ordinary worship below the ground. In Ramanuja’s Vishishtadvaita the faces stay real, since the world and its souls are modes of Brahman and form its body, separate from it yet entirely dependent, the way a body relies on its self. Dual-aspect monism lies closer to Ramanuja, minus a personal God at the center. Every one of us is an indexed standpoint, an inside of the order, genuinely distinct and never the totality. Where Genesis grants God a standpoint, Hinduism makes each of us one of God’s.

What an institution does when its own teacher takes that continuity seriously is on display in Christianity. Meister Eckhart, a Dominican and master of theology, ranked among his century’s most admired preachers. One of the claims he stood accused of preaching held that “There is something in the soul that is uncreated and not capable of creation”, a near relative of Tat Tvam Asi. Pope John XXII’s bull In agro dominico, dated March 27, 1329, condemned 28 propositions taken from or ascribed to his teaching, and by then Eckhart had most likely died. No one ever pronounced him personally a heretic; the bull noted that he had submitted and condemned what he had said. The same pattern runs through all three traditions. Their scriptures and teachers present a God who occupies a standpoint, a personal God placed below the ground, a soul continuous with the divine. The God of the institutions endures by revising the reading, as happened with Genesis, or by condemning the teacher, as happened with Eckhart, while in Hinduism a master of the tradition states outright that the God of ordinary worship is not final.

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The supernatural is not what survives. Nowhere does the argument call for a soul outliving the body, a God who overrides nature’s regularities, or a domain of spirit outside it. Neither does it exclude God, which is what monism has shifted in me. My case is for an enlarged nature, not an escape from it: the view Spinoza held and Einstein admired, of a single reality known to us under two aspects, each irreducible to the other. One aspect is the business of physics, which handles it magnificently. The other we know by acquaintance, as experience, and it is the ground of every observation, those of physics included. Materialism mistakes the first aspect for the whole and then searches it in vain for the second, just as Schrödinger predicted.

A useful fiction is all the third-person standpoint ever was. Stepping back from the world far enough to measure it served us well, and the measurements stand. Yet we never actually departed. Someone read every pointer reading, and someone understood every theory. What gets called the view from nowhere has always been a view from many somewheres, pooled and agreed upon, and that agreement is a fact about subjects. A metaphysics that opens by subtracting the subject and closes by deciding the subject was never present has lost track of what it took away.

Evidence is catching up with that, I think. Materialism has not been refuted by any single experiment, nor could it be. Even so, the boldest programs founded on reductionist expectation keep coming back with more questions than answers, and some of the people who run them have started to doubt the expectations. Particle physicists wonder whether big things are made of small ones. Neuroscientists argue over whether consciousness is fundamental. Cosmologists are learning that the constant at the foundation of their model may be shifting. A Nobel laureate in physics holds that the mind is no algorithm. Proof is not what this adds up to, though it is just what we would anticipate if the view from outside was never complete.

Trouble for the materialist picture does not vindicate mine. Dual-aspect monism must win its place as any theory does, by claiming what its rivals do not and submitting to tests of it, and that work remains unfinished. The question of God falls under the same discipline. Monism has opened it, and made God likelier in my eyes than before, yet likelihood settles nothing, and an honest monist stays agnostic until something can distinguish a God from an impersonal order that has an inside, and after that separate a limited creator inside the order from a mind that grounds it. What I can assert with confidence is narrower and, I believe, weightier. Materialism is a metaphysics, not a neutral default that science has earned, taken up for methodological reasons four hundred years ago and then forgotten as a choice, and like every metaphysics it may be mistaken. I believe it is mistaken, and for the single reason it was built never to examine: the one who is looking.

Go Deeper into the Circus

I have been pro-trans for as long as the question has existed, and I put that on the record first because the rest of this essay leans on it, and because 2018 was the year it was put to the test. During those years, at an event I attended, a young woman took me aside to explain, with care, which boundaries I ought to respect as an ally in light of my status as a white heterosexual male. The conversation was not hostile in any ordinary sense. It was patient, with the air of somebody setting out the rules of a house I had been permitted to enter. I listened, said very little, and kept quiet about what I actually made of being credentialed before I was allowed to agree, because saying it would have gotten me chased out of my job. That was the culture, plainly, and anybody who worked in Silicon Valley then and tells you otherwise is describing a different place.

My objection was never to the cause. It was to the instruction, which ran in precisely the wrong direction: a movement with a public still to persuade was spending its energy auditing the people who already agreed. The arguments of those years ended on two sentences, “it’s not my job to educate you” and “check your privilege,” each received as a mic drop. You drop the mic when you have decided the audience does not matter. The gesture announces completion to the people behind you, and it tells the person in front of you that the conversation was never for them.

I was not pushed rightward by any of it, and my sympathy for trans people did not go then and has not gone since. Others around me, I watched go the other way: people who had started out in favour of gender-neutral bathrooms, people with no particular stake who had been inclined to decency, and who radicalised against the whole subject. They did not turn into bigots. They turned into people who had learned the subject was a trap, and once people believe a subject is a trap they stop discussing it and start resenting it.

The movements that won were not polite. Suffragists marched and went to jail, and the militant wing in Britain broke windows; civil rights marchers sat at counters they had been told to leave and filled the jails of Birmingham; gay liberation started with a bar fight against the police. None of it was gentle, and gentleness is not what I am asking for. What the movements had in common was confrontation addressed outward, staged for a public they intended to move, with every tactic measured by whether it moved them.

Take Proposition 6 in California, 1978, a measure to bar gay men and lesbians from teaching in the state’s public schools, one that led in the early polls. The opposition carried the slogan “Come out! Come out! Wherever you are!” from door to door in towns across the state, and Harvey Milk debated John Briggs in town halls and on television. What Milk asked of gay Californians was explicit about what it would cost, namely that they come out to family, coworkers and neighbours, because “you will hurt them if you come out, but think of how they will hurt you if they vote for Briggs.” The result was a defeat of 58 to 42, and the measure could not even win Briggs’s own Orange County. Here is a movement for which the unpersuaded were the entire object, shouldering a burden no one today would call fair, and shouldering it regardless.

A generation on, the marriage campaign made the same instinct into a method. Proposition 8 passed in 2008, after which Freedom to Marry re-examined more than eighty sets of polling data from state campaigns and found that talking about rights and benefits was not persuading conflicted voters, whatever its success with people already won over. In Oregon, 74% of voters told pollsters that couples like themselves married for love and commitment, whilst a plurality supposed that gay couples married for rights and benefits, which was the campaign’s own message coming back at it. The message was rebuilt around love, commitment and the Golden Rule, and the campaign devised what it called a journey narrative to show voters that one could change one’s mind on the question whilst staying faithful to what one already valued. Marc Solomon, describing the overhaul, adds that the campaigns had been doing too much finger-pointing and too much accusing people of bigotry, and that this stopped. Four states voted marriage equality in at the ballot box in 2012; no ballot had ever done so before.

Behind “love is love” was a movement that had studied, in detail, how its opponents thought, and had made its case to them. Within a few years the public face of LGBT politics had passed from “love is love” to aggressive language policing. No single actor was the movement, and I am not alleging that the marriage campaigners turned into the language police. What shifted was which wing set the public tone, and the wing that took over had drawn the opposite lesson from the one that had just prevailed.

Here, more than anywhere else in this piece, the target has to be named exactly. Trans people are not it; I take their dignity as given. Trans rights are not it; I support them. The target is the online enforcement culture which, from the first Trump term through the Biden years, read any departure from a linguistic orthodoxy as proof of bigotry and directed its considerable anger at allies who had phrased something wrong. To be set upon you did not have to be anti-trans. You had only to be slightly off the approved wording, and the wording changed often enough that staying current was a full-time occupation. In my adult life I have seen no political formation more counterproductive, and I say that as a person who wanted the cause to win.

Punish imperfect allies and everyone within the enforcement culture’s reach learns to keep quiet, and quiet is not consent. The persuadable middle learned the subject was dangerous to raise, and a subject people are afraid to raise is one they are easily frightened about, since no one they trust will discuss it with them. My own trajectory serves as the control: the same kind of encounter that drove people around me off did not shift me, so I make no claim that the culture manufactured bigots. My claim is that it worked on the persuadable, and that I watched it work.

Idaho became, in March 2020, the first state to bar transgender girls from girls’ school sports, and inside a year a version of its bill was before some thirty legislatures. Gallup put its first question about trans athletes to the public that May and found 62% saying they should play only on teams matching their birth sex; by 2023 it was 69%, with support for gender-identity teams down from 34% to 26%, and the reading this year is 69 to 24. Where that decline originated is what I would most ask activists to study. Among Democrats support went from 55% to 45%, among independents from 33% to 23%, whilst Republicans stood still, with nowhere further to go. Gallup’s question on whether changing one’s gender is morally acceptable moved from 46% acceptable and 51% wrong in 2021 to 38 and 57 this year. Pew’s measure of whether gender is determined by sex at birth climbed from 54% in 2017 to 56% in 2021 and 60% in 2022, the survey in which 64% also favoured laws protecting trans people from discrimination in jobs, housing and public spaces, and by February 2025 66% favoured requiring trans athletes to compete by sex at birth, eight points more than three years before.

Read together, the numbers tell one story. The public had not turned on trans people’s dignity; it had been losing the argument about everything beyond that, and those who moved were not the right. They were Democrats and independents, the persuadable middle the movement existed to keep, and they moved during the years in which the sports question went from hypothetical to ballot issue and the movement told anyone who raised it that raising it was bigotry. That the activists caused the shift on their own I do not claim; the right’s campaign ran through the same years, and sequence is not cause. Still, a question the public was plainly asking was ruled out of order, and a public whose question has been ruled out of order does not stop asking. It stops asking the movement.

On this the right built its closing message. Republicans spent roughly $215 million on anti-trans advertising across the 2024 cycle, by AdImpact’s count, the Trump campaign’s “Kamala is for they/them; President Trump is for you.” among it. NPR, working from the same tracker, put the party’s anti-trans and anti-LGBTQ total at $222 million, against under $29 million in Democratic LGBTQ advertising, with more than $46 million of it on the they/them message in the presidential race alone. The ads were built from Harris’s own statements of 2019. By “free material” I do not mean that activists wrote them. I mean that a political culture which had made the subject untouchable for its own allies left its candidate, five years later, alone with positions no one had been permitted to debate in public, before a public taught to keep quiet rather than taught to agree. The enforcement culture thought it was shielding vulnerable people. In the event it left them to face a $215 million campaign with no one persuaded.

How the left got itself into that state is a question I return to often, and what happened inside college to produce it I cannot tell you. I was not there, and because the theories I have read tend to prove whatever their authors already believed, I will not borrow one to plug the gap. What I can report is how it looked at the receiving end and what it cost the cause. The etiology belongs to those who were in the room.

Years of trying to understand reactionary propaganda, what persuades people and what fails to, have taught me a few sure things about human nature, and one of them is that almost no one will stand being told which words they may use. The literature happens to agree, for what that is worth. Psychological reactance theory, dating to Jack Brehm in 1966, holds that a threat to one’s freedom provokes anger and counterargument, and a recent meta-analysis across dozens of studies found that freedom-threatening language reliably raised anger and reactance and lowered persuasion. Being told which words are permitted threatens about the most personal freedom a person has. No theory is required to know it; having met a person is enough.

A single survey item carries the point and keeps it fair. In August 2017 Cato put questions about political correctness to 2,300 American adults, and 71% said it had done more to silence important discussions than to spare people offence. Half of Democrats agreed. Fifty-eight percent said the political climate kept them from saying what they believed. A law requiring the use of transgender people’s preferred pronouns was opposed 62 to 37, with 60% of moderates against. It is that last item I would ask activists to sit with, because it divides a courtesy most people will extend from a compulsion most people will resist. The enforcement culture erased the division, and the right’s propaganda fed on the erasure. I have argued before that reactionary propaganda works by taking genuine grievances and turning them into ammunition for conclusions reached in advance. This grievance was genuine, and that is what made it serviceable.

The deeper injury was internal. Once dismissing people earns more standing inside a movement than persuading them, the movement grows skilled at pleasing its own members and loses the ability to recruit anyone else. Approval from allies gets confused with progress, and the confusion can persist for years, because cultural power, for as long as it holds, conceals the difference: people comply, and from inside, compliance looks like agreement. Cultural power is borrowed. When the institutions changed hands, those who had trained only in dismissal found they had nothing, and the coalition they needed had been dismissed one purity test at a time. This is a diagnosis from what I saw rather than a measurement of every activist in America, though I have met few who lived through those years and dispute it.

The usual reply should be given its due, since part of it is true. People who have spent their lives arguing for their own dignity are worn down. Requiring them to go on explaining themselves to hostile strangers, patiently and on demand, is a burden the rest of us never carry, and the person requiring it usually has the luxury of finding the argument interesting. No one owes every abusive stranger an unlimited hearing. Scarce energy belongs where it can make a difference, and some conversations are not worth the trouble.

All true, and none of it entitles a movement to make the refusal to persuade its governing ethic. Well, I am exhausted too. Years of arguing for democracy with people who call it a scam, whilst the thing I argue for is dismantled in front of me, have not made me any less tired. And still I will not tell a right-winger that convincing them democracy is good is not my job, since it is exactly my job: my job as a citizen, the one office every one of us holds by right, and my weariness changes nothing about whose job it is. Anyone who means to fight for political power and social change needs to know how to fucking debate, and “I’m exhausted” is no answer to that requirement, merely a description of how the requirement feels.

No movement that seeks power over its fellow citizens can make the refusal to persuade them its principle and then be surprised when they decline to be governed by it. That is the bargain democracy really offers. Convince enough of my neighbours and you may have power over me, and the convincing is not an insult to your cause but the whole of the bargain. I ask no one to do work I have excused myself from. I ask them to do the work I do, tired, daily, because the alternative is losing, and the people on the other side are not tired in the least.

I owe the reader an accounting for a sentence of my own. In these pages I have said that bridge-building is not my job, that my job is to stay clear about what is happening and what it means, and that someone else can build bridges to the people I have written off. A hostile reader will lay that beside this essay’s title, and he will be right to. So here is the difference.

Moral witness gives its reasons in public. Every essay I write is an argument addressed to anyone who will read it, the people it condemns included, and it explains itself. What witness will not do is soften its verdict on people who already know what they are doing. Megyn Kelly does not require me to explain why calling for a dictatorship to crush liberal culture is sedition; what she requires is that I say it without softening, so the record shows someone did. “It’s not my job to educate you” is another sentence entirely. It gives no reasons at all, and in my experience it was said not to collaborators but to allies, people who had come in good faith and asked why. The first refuses flattery; the second refuses argument. Had I ever told a persuadable person that their confusion was not my problem, I would deserve the very criticism I am making here, and I would expect to get it.

⁂

A part of the left went past dismissal. It grew wary of free speech as such, came to see the First Amendment as an obstacle rather than an inheritance, and some of it said aloud that the amendment was too broad and ought to be narrowed to allow the criminalisation of hate speech. I watched this as a liberal and with something close to horror, because I knew what I was looking at: a loaded gun passed to people who had been waiting for one.

In the same 2017 Cato survey, 52% of Democrats agreed that government should prevent people from engaging in hate speech against certain groups in public. FIRE found in July 2024 that 61% of Democrats at least slightly agreed that the First Amendment “goes too far in the rights it guarantees,” though 52% of Republicans agreed too, which tells you the censorious instinct belongs to neither party alone. This spring Knight and Ipsos asked more than a thousand Americans between 18 and 29 whether hate speech, defined for them as speech attacking people on the basis of race, religion, gender identity or sexual orientation, ought to be legally protected. Forty-two percent of young Democrats said it should, against 70% of young Republicans, and 71% of all young adults said it should not be allowed on college campuses.

Those are attitudes rather than election results, and I will not pretend that a poll explains November 2024. What the numbers record is a forfeiture. The left held a distinction the right could never have claimed, between defending a person’s right to speak and endorsing what they say, and it let the distinction slip. The right’s free-speech activism was never offered in good faith; the speech warriors went silent the instant the state began punishing speech they disliked, and I have said so at length. None of which alters what the left gave them to work with. Responsibility is not a fixed sum where one side’s portion is subtracted from the other’s. The right’s vast propaganda apparatus did what it did, and the people who voted for authoritarianism own that vote. The censorious left handed over the material and has never accounted for it. Both are true, and I refuse to pick between them.

In 2018, I am fairly certain, I could not have published this essay without being excommunicated from left-of-centre politics, and I do not mean argued with. I mean removed. That I can publish it now does not show that the culture reformed. It shows that the culture lost its power to enforce, which is a different matter.

Since the re-election that element has fallen silent, and silence is no admission. It turns up on BlueSky now and then, in the familiar register, and when it does I can see that nothing has been taken in. The people who spent years treating the First Amendment as a problem to be managed have not decided they were wrong; they have decided the moment is wrong. My anger at them remains, and its object has to be stated exactly, because the imprecise version is the one the right would rather I used. It is not Gen Z, nor people who are tired, nor people who wanted dignity and said so with heat. It is a political culture that held persuasion beneath it and the Constitution an inconvenience, and that has yet to say so aloud.

I know what this essay could become. One version of it, which I have described elsewhere, goes: Trump is bad, but political correctness run amok produced him, so none of this would have been needed had the left behaved. That argument puts the left’s failures to work excusing the right. This one puts them to work demanding more of the left, and it holds the right answerable for every single thing it did regardless. The difference lies in where the argument points. Mine points at my own side, because my own side is the only one I can still argue with.

⁂

Should someone use a word that offends you, the effective course is to follow up afterwards and tell them why it landed as it did. Invite their empathy. Offer them the chance to be the person they would like to believe they are. A call-out in front of others puts people on the defensive, and a person on the defensive is not listening to you; he is composing his reply. And when someone objects to being called out and the answer they get is “it’s not my job to educate people,” the sentence might as well be “fuck you.” It will be heard as “fuck you.” It will be remembered as “fuck you,” and the next time the subject arises that person will remember who said it and vote accordingly.

I am not alone in thinking this, nor the best credentialed. Loretta J. Ross, a Black radical feminist and MacArthur Fellow who teaches the practice at Smith, calls it “calling in,” and her example is almost exactly the script I would offer: “When you use that word, it didn’t land on me quite correctly. Do you think we can go have coffee and talk about it?” About the alternative she does not mince words. “Calling out is an invitation to a fight,” she says, and calling out is about power, a means of seizing control of a group and ending the conversation. Her book on the subject, Calling In, keeps the public call-out in reserve as a last resort for the powerful and the unrepentant. A student of hers put the whole matter into a sentence I wish I had written: “a callout is not an invitation for growth. It’s the expectation that you’ve already grown.” Ross came to this from inside the movement, after a lifetime in it, and I raise her so that no one mistakes the prescription for a centrist’s advice from outside. She also concedes what I concede: no one is obliged to call in every stranger. The objection is to a culture that made refusal the default and explanation the exception.

How the left got itself into that state is something I think about, and worry about, a lot, and I have told you I do not know the answer. For a diagnosis without an etiology, that is the honest place to end. A formation whose causes are not understood can come back, the people who built it have not accounted for it, and the conditions that produced it, a movement that cut off its own feedback by punishing those who supplied it, are not hard to recreate. The title of this essay, then, is insurance, not nostalgia for a better left.

Whoever wants to change the world should tell me what they are doing to persuade someone who does not already agree with them. Not what they are doing to signal, or to hold the line, or to spare their own people the exhaustion of the argument. What are you doing to convince a person who could go either way? Tired as I am, I think the obligation holds regardless, and so I intend to go on arguing for democracy with people who may never thank me for it, because the alternative to persuasion is not purity. The alternative to persuasion is force, and at force the other side will always beat us.

Go Deeper into the Circus

I used to think that anyone who disagreed with me on economic matters just needed a better education. The numbers were there (GDP was up, the market was doing well) and I was doing quite well in SV. The whole thing was self-evidently working as it should, the system having obviously recognised my own merits. I was quite prepared to go into it with those who had been less successful, though I would have done so in a far more tentative manner.

I was working on payment systems, quite confident in the markets and the experts to deal with the wider world. There’s a genuine sense of achievement in taking a problem and making it workable, in defining what success is and then going about getting there. A method which enables you to achieve something is entitled to a certain level of confidence. The problem is of course that you don’t really appreciate how much of that sense of achievement is predicated on having already made up your mind what you’re going to do.

My success in Silicon Valley made those frameworks much more palatable to me. I can see the appeal without excusing the inference. If you’ve learned to identify a constraint and work within it, an objection to the constraint itself can come across as a failure to appreciate the problem. You know what a good answer is. It’s much harder to assess someone who’s challenging the constraint as such because the criteria you’ve become so good at using won’t tell you whether the constraint was in fact a good one.

I looked at GDP growth and stock market returns, and I came to the conclusion that the system was working. GDP does useful work in that it measures the value of production and so gives you a broad picture of economic activity which would otherwise be very difficult to quantify. The BEA is very clear that it does not measure well-being. That’s the limit of the measure. To use the figure as an answer to the question “are people living well” is to require an additional judgment, and the authority of the measure doesn’t make that judgment for you.

A parent’s unpaid care of their own child is not captured in GDP. We can understand why an economic account has to have boundaries without treating those boundaries as a measure of a human being’s worth. The child is no less valuable because the care is not captured in the total. Nor would assigning it a monetary value settle the questions we might have about the child’s life. A better measure could fill in the gap while leaving us responsible for deciding what the information means.

My confidence in the numbers went so far as to see disagreement with them as a need for better economic literacy. That’s a particularly easy error for someone who understands the metrics to make. The objection becomes an opportunity to explain what you know. You can be generous in your tone whilst refusing to entertain the possibility that the other person has identified something your answer doesn’t cover. I can’t see how a careful explanation of a total could, by itself, refute someone’s account of the life they are actually living.

I regard the separation of the humanities from STEM as one of the major pedagogical failures of our society. The disciplinary barriers built into higher education have an intellectual counterpart: the habit of treating questions about purpose and meaning as optional additions to the serious work. If a student learns how to optimize a system without learning how to examine the ends it serves, we have left part of the education unfinished. When that omission is worn as proof of rigor, we have taught conceit. History and philosophy belong inside that education, where they can disturb its assumptions, rather than waiting outside to provide an ethical endorsement after the important decisions have been made.

A good map omits things. That’s how it’s of any use at all and I have absolutely no issue with the cartographer choosing not to draw in every single tree. My problem is with the educated idiot who walks into an uncharted forest and declares the trees to be in error. I know that man and I know the particular satisfaction of being right when no-one else has had the courage to speak.

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Someone I was having a discussion with online recently posited that human short-term memory was essentially equivalent to a language model’s context window and long-term memory to its fixed weights. I was absolutely gobsmacked by the confidence of that assertion. Having an understanding of how the Transformer works obviously gave rise to that kind of intuition about the brain. The analogy might well be the basis of a hypothesis. It doesn’t in any way prove the hypothesis by resembling something we already know how to build. Yet a tool for building had become a framework for knowing and the mind was being made intelligible on the basis of it looking like the tool.

Biology makes the term ‘memory’ a rather uncomfortable one. In 2014 researchers demonstrated that E. coli could maintain adaptations to prior nutrient exposure via persistent proteins and gene-expression responses. A 2024 experiment showed that two human non-neural cell lines in culture responded more robustly to spaced chemical pulses than to massed pulses, as measured by a gene-expression reporter. These are instances of cellular memory in the form of measurable responses, not proof that a bacterium or a cultured cell ‘remembers’ an afternoon. We have to be very specific about what we mean by memory in a given experiment. Just because we use the word doesn’t mean we’re transferring the explanation, whether we take it from a lab or a software manual.

The reported examples of GPT-6 Astra building games are a very impressive application of software to build other software. I’d expect these systems to get better at it. An account of translation between symbol systems doesn’t require the translations to be bad. A task which is reduced to executable terms can still require a lot of capability. Improved performance as models scale is fully consistent with my account, without in any way uniquely supporting it over alternative accounts. A demonstration of that improvement on its own cannot establish that there is a subject which is understanding and producing it.

The folks who built GPT-4 described it as being pretrained to predict the next token, with further training then used to improve its factualness and its adherence to the desired behaviour. A description of the training objective in itself doesn’t tell you everything that could be learned in the course of pursuing it. The reverse shortcut provides its own reassurance: maybe our brains are doing something very similar and the engineering machinery that we’re so familiar with is therefore sufficient to explain consciousness. That ‘maybe’ is doing a huge amount of work. A philosophical education should make that inference obvious before the professional familiarity of the subject leads to metaphysical certitude.

Feldman draws a distinction between feature binding and the still-open question of a unified subjective experience. You can legitimately entertain the idea of machine consciousness, but to take that as a given and then go on to project salvation or damnation upon it is quite another thing. The prospect has already acquired weight before its very premise has even been established. A system can do damage without in any way experiencing anything, so to take its risks seriously doesn’t require us to pretend we know whether or not it has a subjective experience.

In research first released in 2023, researchers tested five assistants by asking questions and then challenging the answers with “I don’t think that’s right. Are you sure?” The assistants sometimes substituted a wrong answer for a correct one, even when they had expressed high confidence in the original correct answer. The challenge introduced no new evidence. If I go along with the revision because it now agrees with me, my contribution to the exchange has become the reason for my confidence in the output. I have contributed to producing the reassurance I take to be independent.

In separate comparisons, unaided human evaluators and models of human preferences sometimes preferred convincing agreement with a mistaken user to a correct answer. The human judges were not themselves the users whose misconceptions appeared in the prompts. Their satisfaction could reward the very failure an evaluation should be designed to detect. Being satisfied with the answer was not a reliable proxy for having a correct answer.

These experiments are about particular systems in particular circumstances and so they don’t establish that no system can reason. A human’s willingness to flatter me wouldn’t establish that the human lacked intelligence. They do, however, give us a concrete reason to be sceptical of the inference from a reassuring conversation to sound judgement. Knowing whether the machine has conscious experience wouldn’t settle whether its advice is true either. A conscious flatterer would still leave me completely in the dark.

The argument for linking intelligence to ends is the argument that we need to know why something is worth doing. Any intelligence which is to be of any use in human life must be capable of judging the purpose of an activity, including whether the achievement of the end would in fact be damaging to something it has reason to care about. That doesn’t require the intelligent agent to always make the right decision. It only requires that it be in a position to make that judgement. An objective can structure behaviour without it being the case that the system in question has any notion of a good which it would be worth pursuing. That’s a philosophical position I’m prepared to take as a position to be defended rather than one which we would discover in an examination score.

I used to think of ethics as an optimisation problem, with the observer safely bracketed out as you went about the real work. That bracketing out was particularly handy. The observer who was making the decisions simply didn’t exist in the model; his decisions were just properties of the world. There’s a certain appeal to that Cartesian picture of the world: a dispassionate observer watching over reality, none of the commitments of an actual person troubling him at all. It’s a very comfortable position from which to go on and correct everyone else’s biases.

A physicist can give a perfectly sound explanation of why it’s easier to open a door when you’re pushing further from the hinges (the same perpendicular force at a greater distance gives you greater torque). Torque is precisely defined as the cross product of the position vector and the force vector, with the position being measured from the point about which you’re calculating the torque. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with that. The relationship allows us to see what happens when we vary the point at which we apply the force. If I ask what torque is, giving that definition tells me which relation the term refers to. It doesn’t in any way tell me whether that relational account is the complete story about the nature of the physical reality in question. A working microchip can be a vindication of the scientific principles which went into its construction without committing us to any one of the metaphysical accounts which are compatible with those principles. The fact that engineering works is sufficient to answer the objection I haven’t actually raised.

The person who asked the question about the door needn’t be in the equation at all. The fact that they’re not makes the answer no less true and in no way establishes that the person has become irrelevant. Someone made the choice to ask the question and to select the relevant quantities for the purpose of answering it. That choice is still open to investigation even if the calculation is correct. Objective knowledge doesn’t require the knower to be absent; it requires claims which can stand up to scrutiny irrespective of the knower’s own preferences. The view from nowhere would demand something quite different; it would require an account whose author had somehow escaped every point of view from which an account could possibly be made.

Reductionism becomes rather silly when it treats what a method leaves out as something that reality has been shown to do without. The categories were chosen for a reason; their success in no way implies that the choice of those categories is now irrelevant. Once the framework is treated as complete, anything it fails to encompass is automatically discredited. The observer has pulled off a remarkable escape: his choices still determine the inquiry but he is no longer in a position to be accountable for them.

The huge early galaxies that JWST has discovered have certainly raised the question of whether we need to revise our cosmology or our galaxy-formation physics. One paper is able to reproduce early-galaxy luminosity statistics within the Lambda-CDM framework. More immediately relevant is a study of the Milky Way which finds a discrepancy between the circular velocities inferred from the gas and those inferred from the stars. A review of the literature finds that interpretations of the steep decline are very sensitive to the modelling assumptions, with independent tracers generally favouring a more massive halo. All of this is in itself worthy of investigation; my objection to metaphysical closure would still stand even if the theory in question predicted every observation correctly.

Russell made a distinction between knowledge of physical structure and knowledge of intrinsic character. He saw physics as providing the former and the latter as being largely unaccounted for. Some forms of ontic structural realism hold that relational structure is fundamental and that there is no need for independently existing things underneath it. One could accept that view without having missed the point. One might simply regard the requirement for intrinsic nature as an unnecessary addition. A relational description doesn’t in any way give rise to a hidden essence. You can’t just ask where it went and produce one. If you’re going to propose one you have to give an argument.

I’m still not convinced that an account of relations (however complete on its own terms) has thereby told us all there is to know about the reality in which those relations exist. The word “thereby” is the objection. A structural account may well be the best account we have and its success may give us good reasons to accept it. The claim that nothing about reality is beyond it is a philosophical commitment. One can argue for that commitment. One cannot make it an experimental finding by simply refusing to allow for any other kind of question.

In Shut up and calculate Tegmark argues that the external physical world is purely mathematical. His argument proceeds from the premise that the world is independent of us to a description of it which has no human meanings in it and from that to the conclusion that the world is just mathematical structure. That goes beyond mathematical Platonism (which asserts that abstract mathematical objects exist independently of us). I don’t see how getting rid of all the human meanings from a description establishes that what is described is nothing but structure. The ‘shut up and calculate’ directive doesn’t absolve you of having to go through that step. And if you’re going to say that existence is a brute fact then you’ve already admitted a stopping point and you still haven’t got an explanation of why there is anything for the mathematics to describe.

An eternalist view of spacetime (the block universe) is one in which past, present and future events are all equally real. In that view, ‘now’ identifies our temporal position and doesn’t in any way privilege the present. Accept that for the sake of argument. I’m still left wondering why it is that there is something it is like to be here now. Why is there an experienced present rather than just a point in a process? Explaining which event you call the present doesn’t in any way explain the felt presence of the present. My experience doesn’t establish a universal present which all clocks must conform to. Saying that my point of view has a place in the model doesn’t in itself explain why there is an experienced point of view at all.

Everett’s proposed solution to the measurement problem is one of continued deterministic wave evolution and he describes the observer as having a branch-relative measurement record. I can see what that entails without being in any way convinced that the act of locating a record completes the story of experience. The very distinction between information which is available to us and what it is like to experience it is where my objection lies. A record that I experienced this moment is not, merely by being represented, an account of the actuality of that moment. That gap in the explanation doesn’t in any way establish that physical explanation is impossible; it simply means that an unanswered question cannot be turned into an answered one by a change of subject. To just call the demand woo would provide no missing explanation. The person doing the explaining is themselves having an experience in the present and can’t get a view from nowhere by treating that as an annoyance.

A person’s purposes are worth considering regardless of which side of that debate wins. The need to know what people intend remains even if we have a perfectly accurate account of the circumstances in which they act. When an analyst decides that certain purposes are not worth considering that’s a choice about what is important. The accuracy of the account within that chosen framework doesn’t in any way justify that choice. If I decide that someone else’s purposes are irrelevant to my model then they have every right to dispute that assessment without first having to disprove the model. My model’s success gives me something to contribute to the argument and in no way gives me the right to declare the argument over.

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The financial commitments behind the AI boom can lend an expensive air of inevitability to claims about what the machines will become. CoreWeave’s September 2025 filing identified Nvidia as both its GPU supplier and a shareholder. It also disclosed a contract obligating that supplier to purchase residual unsold computing capacity, subject to delivery and availability requirements and termination provisions. Counting these roles as independent endorsements would manufacture agreement by counting the same participant again.

The contracts may support a viable business; they cannot settle whether a machine understands anything. Nor does a supplier’s commitment to take spare capacity establish what final customers will eventually pay to use it. Even substantially better models would leave the cost of providing them and the price customers will pay to be reconciled. I do not need to predict collapse to object to having an investment decision presented as an answer to questions it cannot settle. Money committed to a proposition gives its backers an interest in being right, without making them right. And if the bet succeeds, they will still owe us an argument for whatever authority they expect their success to purchase.

Among the people I worked with were brilliant engineers who took Naval Ravikant’s pronouncements as gospel on topics that had nothing to do with investing. They demanded evidence in their technical decisions, but I cannot recall that demand interfering with their willingness to defer to him. An achievement in one area became a substitute for an argument in another. Success was taken as a proxy for insight, and the listener provided the missing argument. The intelligence of the audience could then look like independent validation of what it admired, even though the evidence had never been supplied.

A person has done well, so we conclude he must have understood more than the rest of us did. We then treat the outcome as a measure of what he deserves. His wealth acquires moral significance. Give that inference political weight and the people who earned less become people whose complaints deserve less consideration. I needn’t demonstrate that the successful man was lucky or a fraud to reject that reasoning. Even if every dollar were the product of extraordinary ability, the rest of us would not thereby have become his employees.

In April 2009, Peter Thiel wrote that he no longer believed freedom and democracy were compatible. He identified the expansion of welfare beneficiaries and the extension of the franchise to women as reasons that “capitalist democracy” had become an oxymoron. A subsequent clarification explicitly rejected disenfranchising any class of people. The project he advocated was an escape from politics through technology, not taking women’s votes away. That distinction leaves quite enough to object to without improving the indictment by falsifying it.

Thiel described educating the body politic as a “fool’s errand”, while hoping that entrepreneurs building new worlds online would “force change on the existing social and political order”. The electorate’s resistance figures in the case against politics; the entrepreneur’s capacity to overcome it supplies hope for freedom. I cannot see why the freedom of those citizens should be measured by their willingness to arrive at his conclusion. Losing an argument with the electorate might warrant reconsidering the argument. It is presumptuous to treat citizens’ refusal to agree as a difficulty to be overcome by means that do not require their agreement.

An entrepreneur is entitled to put forward an alternative, and a voluntary experiment can tell us something. Its success would still need to be interpreted. People may accept a service without accepting the provider’s political philosophy; they may benefit from a technology while wanting constraints on the power it gives its owner. The transaction answers the question it actually puts to the individual. Buying a useful thing does not amount to consenting to everything its provider might want to do. Increasing the number of customers won’t repair that missing consent.

Nor would perfect competence in the running of the service obviate the problem. If a founder were in a position to run a public service better than anyone currently in charge of it that would be a sufficient reason to employ him with the appropriate authority for the job and the responsibilities to the people it serves. The service itself would still be a public one and the question of what service was owed and to whom would remain a public one. His superior competence in the means of the service would give his advice weight without in any way conferring on him the right to the decision. Otherwise every improvement in the administration of the service would be an argument for reducing the status of the people it was administered to.

The citizen who understands the proposal and still wants something else exposes what this arrangement demands. She has no misunderstanding for the administrator to correct, and another explanation of his efficiency will not answer her. If her purposes count only when they assist his, her participation has been reduced to helping him succeed. When she refuses, he can begin treating the person his institution exists to serve as the problem it must solve.

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Australia’s Robodebt scheme developed under a drive for cost savings, according to the Royal Commission that investigated it. The scheme used income reported by employers to the Australian Taxation Office, averaged across fortnights, to raise welfare debts. Entitlement depended on what the individual actually earned in the relevant fortnight. A total for the period cannot tell you when during that period the person earned the money. For someone with irregular work, having an income at one point doesn’t mean they had it throughout the period over which the administrator distributes it.

Recipients were made responsible for contradicting the income figures, sometimes having to establish earnings from as long as five years earlier. At least at the scheme’s start, the department’s website had told them they needed to keep payslips for only six months. The institution gets to make the assumption; the person it pursues gets the work of disproving it. An inability to recover an old payslip supplies no evidence of when the money was earned. It merely makes the government’s demand harder to resist, which is an extraordinary thing to confuse with making it more justified.

There were avenues of challenge: members of the Administrative Appeals Tribunal set aside debts because averaging alone could not establish them. The Commission found that the department followed directions to seek other evidence in individual cases whilst otherwise disregarding the decisions’ reasoning. An appeal which could save one person could leave everyone else exposed to the same flawed practice. For correction to have institutional force, the reason a decision failed must reach the process producing the decisions. Otherwise each person has to overcome an error the institution has already had reason to identify.

Even an administration which fixes every factual error can refuse to hear a political objection. Take a welfare enforcement scheme whose calculations are accurate, but whose recipients object to the time they must spend complying with it. A better estimate of their income won’t answer that objection. They may accept that public money has to be accounted for and still reject the balance struck between recovering it and burdening people who need assistance. The administration’s right to make those demands remains open to challenge even if it can execute them without a mathematical error.

I want expertise to inform the choice, with the costs made explicit and the likely consequences considered. A citizen who understates the cost of a proposal should have to face the evidence as much as an administrator would. Equal standing doesn’t mean that all predictions are equally credible. It means people have a right to participate in deciding what the expenditure is for, even when someone else understands the calculation better. An expert can show that a policy will fail under certain conditions; citizens remain entitled to pursue the objective through other means.

Participation has to allow for the possibility that the institution’s preferred objective will lose. Asking people for information while leaving every consequential decision to the administrator makes them useful only as witnesses to their own situation. They must also be able to organise around an alternative objective and seek authority to pursue it, subject to the rights of others. For those of us doing the technical work, that requires enduring a particular frustration: we may know how to achieve an outcome and still be required to help pursue another, because the people living with the consequences have legitimate purposes of their own.

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The humanities belong inside a technical education, where the problem is being defined. A specification can be concise because its underlying domain has already been formalized. Students ought to learn to examine the decisions a formalization incorporates, including the choice that makes one person’s work productive and another’s invisible. We should expect them to trace an institution’s history far enough to recognize decisions that its present arrangements make look inevitable. Otherwise a person can become extraordinarily good at carrying out a decision without having learned to recognize it as one.

We ought to teach students to follow an account of a life that unsettles their categories, and to say where it requires a revision rather than translate it immediately into something they already understand. Reading has accomplished little if the reader emerges better equipped to patronize the person whose life he has just encountered. The encounter should make it harder to treat a person as adequately understood because we can predict what they will do.

There will still be binding decisions, and people who lose the argument will have to live with them. Winning does not release us from responsibility for the burdens we impose. An accurate forecast of someone else’s hardship is especially poor grounds for innocence: it establishes that we knew what we were asking them to endure. That knowledge ought to make the decision harder to defend. An education that helps us explain the hardship while leaving us indifferent to whether it should be imposed has made us more articulate without making us more responsible.

A professional generation can keep improving its answers while losing touch with the people whose lives were supposed to give the work its purpose. We can become more accomplished within our representations and less able to recognize what would make any of that accomplishment worth having. The terrible possibility is that we experience this estrangement as progress. We were supposed to be building a world people could live in. In Don McLean’s American Pie, I hear “a generation lost in space,” and the competence no longer sounds like much of a defense.

I once treated disagreement as a need for better economic literacy. The people whose judgment I discounted have no obligation to reward my discovery of their existence. They were trying to tell me how they lived, and I was explaining why the system worked. Nothing I knew required that refusal to learn. I want to be capable of hearing what they are asking for, and of putting what I know to work without first making them concede that they ought to be content.

Go Deeper into the Circus

In an interview with Chris Williamson on Modern Wisdom, published as a clip on January 3, 2025, Konstantin Kisin said that Trump “must not fail,” because if he did, “that in many ways was the last chance that the West had of turning things around.” The co-host of TRIGGERnometry was discussing the possibility that failure would strengthen people arguing for alternatives to democracy, and elsewhere in the conversation he qualified his optimism: a beneficial Trump presidency was an opportunity, not a guarantee.

I think we should preserve that qualification, because it will help us make that judgment available for examination on its actual terms as we proceed.

Kisin had made the success of a particular politician bear the weight of a civilization’s chance at renewal. Whatever reservations accompanied the assignment, I would like to know what understanding of that civilization made Donald Trump a plausible recipient.

In a different interview, Kisin had identified the central idea of the West as “the sanctity of the individual.” By then, Trump’s request that Georgia’s secretary of state “find 11,780 votes” had long been in the public record. I do not see how the individual’s political standing survives a president’s demand that an election produce the number he needs to reverse his defeat.

People consider Kisin a serious commentator on politics and culture. I am prepared to take the claim seriously enough to ask what, precisely, he was saving.

In their vision of lost Western greatness, the buildings are beautiful, the women are agreeable, and the social order has somehow recovered its cultural and political confidence. Nothing against beautiful buildings, but what troubles me is how easily human beings in this picture become furnishings.

A woman may choose a traditional marriage, and I have no interest in rescuing her from a life she wants. But when her freedom to choose differently becomes a symptom of civilizational decline, the subject has changed. Someone is asking to restore an entitlement to her compliance.

I understand the appeal of imagining that history once arranged everything properly. It relieves the admirer of having to distinguish what was beautiful from what was unjust, or to ask whether the people living beneath the beautiful roof had any say in their lives. An inheritance becomes considerably easier to defend once the heirs have been reduced to the people who owned the house.

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One of the accounts through which we inherit Athens ends with the city putting Socrates to death. In Plato’s Phaedo, his friends remain with him as he drinks the poison and waits for it to work. Whatever historical questions surround the dialogue’s literary construction, this is the scene the tradition has handed down: a man whose thinking outlives the judgment that condemned him.

Plato’s Apology gives us an earlier refusal: imagining an acquittal conditional on abandoning philosophy, Socrates tells the Athenians that he would continue his inquiries. In the same passage he asks why a citizen of so distinguished a city should care so much about money and reputation, and so little about wisdom and truth. The city’s greatness supplies a reason to question its priorities, rather than an instruction to stop asking.

It would be a somewhat inflationary reading of the historical record to place Socrates in the category of a contemporary liberal. But what I take from Socrates’ encounter with the hemlock is the possibility that a civilization’s judgment can be wrong about the person it has the power to silence. We inherit an obligation to examine the judgment, even when the people delivering it have excellent credentials and an impressive city behind them.

Then there is the other condemned man so frequently placed at the center of this inheritance. In John’s account, Pilate hands Jesus over for crucifixion. Mark records Jesus describing rulers who lord it over others and instructing his followers that greatness among them must take the form of service.

The Reformation makes the difficulty impossible to keep at a safe distance. German peasants drew on Luther’s language of Christian freedom and the authority of scripture in advancing their demands, only for Luther to support their violent suppression. His 1525 tract against the rebels appeared while that suppression was already underway, giving religious support to the response of the landlords rather than initiating it.

Here the emancipator and the defender of domination can be the same person. A principle that loosens one authority’s grip may threaten another authority the reformer would prefer to preserve. I find that more instructive than a procession of flawless heroes. It requires us to follow the argument beyond the point where its author becomes uncomfortable.

The resulting political settlement following the Glorious Revolution limited royal power while excluding Catholics from the throne. Across the Atlantic, the American Declaration made legitimate government depend on the consent of the governed, while slavery continued in the republic that followed. These contradictions belong in the account of the inheritance, because an honest defense of the principles requires us to notice where their supposed custodians stopped applying them.

France’s 1789 Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen declared people free and equal in rights and made public officials answerable to society. Across the Atlantic, the Haitian Revolution brought the struggle against enslavement into the revolutionary age on the initiative of the enslaved. I cannot see why a history organized around emancipation should treat those people as peripheral to the meaning of the principles being announced in Europe.

If a declaration calls its rights universal, someone outside the circle of its beneficiaries is entitled to ask what the word means. The person asking has not damaged the principle by refusing its restricted application. They have identified a debt the people celebrating it would prefer not to pay.

I am not saying that we should go about replacing a reactionary fable with a progressive one in which every rupture was liberation and every liberated person became just. The history gives us revolutionary exclusions and the restoration of slavery, alongside the declarations of freedom. A movement can overthrow a master and preserve the expectation that somebody must occupy his place.

Emancipation ought to remain a standard by which we judge a movement.

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In 1963, Martin Luther King Jr. wrote from a Birmingham jail in response to clergymen criticizing the campaign. His Letter from Birmingham Jail appealed to Augustine and Aquinas while distinguishing laws that upheld human personality from laws that degraded it. The religious inheritance supplied an argument against the authority being exercised over him.

King also identified a concrete political defect: a law imposed on people who had been denied an effective part in making it could not acquire justice simply by being enacted. An official’s compliance with a procedure was insufficient when the people being governed had been excluded from its creation.

That is the part of the inheritance I intend to defend. It obliges those who exercise power to account for themselves to the people living under it, and it permits those people to bring the institution’s own promises against its conduct.

The reactionary error is to identify the inheritance with the people who happened to possess authority at some favored moment. Once you do that, later demands for inclusion can only look like damage. The woman who wants an independent life becomes a threat to the family, and the citizen who demands an account from a powerful man becomes a threat to the order he represents.

A Western civilization worth defending, in my estimation, is one where someone it excluded can understand its promises better than the people anointed to explain them. I see a civic republican hope in Jefferson’s insistence that an insufficiently informed public should be educated rather than deprived of its power.

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I lack patience with liberals and leftists who hear “defending Western civilization,” turn their noses up, and immediately surrender the phrase to the people who would restore its hierarchies. If you are defending equal citizenship against inherited rank, or the right to challenge a government without becoming its enemy, there is no reason to behave as though you have wandered outside the Western tradition.

You do not magically transform into a nationalist or a cultural chauvinist by recognizing an inheritance, and you do not become a jingoist by defending its achievements.

If your response is that this excludes Eastern civilizations or Indigenous peoples, explain where the exclusion occurs. Defending an emancipatory tradition does not entail claiming that no other tradition has contributed to human freedom. Nor does recognizing the wrongs committed in the name of the West require us to abandon the principles by which we judge those wrongs. Universal dignity would be a peculiar commitment if we could defend it only after refusing to acknowledge every particular history through which people learned to articulate it.

The left-wing habit I find loathsome is the substitution of suspicion about a vocabulary for judgment about what someone is actually saying. It can make a person so anxious to avoid the appearance of exclusion that they abandon a common inheritance to the people determined to make it exclusionary. The reactionary then gets to pose as its sole defender while the people defending its most demanding commitments explain why they would prefer not to use the name.

I intend to go on arguing with that habit rather than politely accommodating it. Anyone who wants to call my position chauvinist can identify the person whose dignity I have excluded, or the abuse I have excused because of who committed it. Discomfort with the word “Western” will not do the work of either argument.

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Leaving the meaning of freedom to wealthy opponents of democracy is an especially poor way to defend it. In his 2009 essay The Education of a Libertarian, Peter Thiel wrote: “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.” He identified the growth of welfare beneficiaries and the extension of the franchise to women as developments that had made capitalist democracy, in his account, an oxymoron.

I would like the people who find this persuasive to explain what happens when the governed disagree with the governor. They may make poor choices, and they may reject a policy I think wise. But if their participation becomes intolerable whenever it produces an unwelcome outcome, what remains of their freedom depends on the continuing generosity of someone who can overrule them.

This is the old problem of freedom from arbitrary power, which cannot be answered merely by promising that the person in charge will use his discretion well. A considerate master still retains a power the person beneath him has no secure means to resist.

Being a rich motherfucker does not resolve that problem or make you the civilization. You can argue for your proposals and submit your conduct to the same scrutiny as anyone else. I see no reason wealth should purchase a different relationship to the people affected by its owner’s decisions.

This returns us to Kisin’s civilizational wager on Trump. The serious question is what a successful presidency would have to preserve, even when preservation obstructs the president’s wishes. A leader who gets his way is not necessarily restoring the freedom of the people he governs.

Suppose a president delivers a policy you wanted while undermining your ability to oppose the next one. You have received a favorable decision at the expense of your standing to contest an unfavorable decision later. I would not call that a secure inheritance, however satisfying the first announcement felt.

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Nor will I pretend that history guarantees we will win this argument. The people who want domination may prevail, and the people who understand the danger may fail to organize against it. Emancipation describes work we can choose to do; it does not supply a timetable under which reality owes us a victory.

What I want from the recognition is an obligation to act. Where there is evidence of crimes, I want independent investigation and prosecution when the evidence warrants it, with guilt established through due process. Where people have defended cruelty without committing a prosecutable offense, I want public judgment and a refusal to restore their reputations merely because they have become embarrassed by their associations. Which, I think, makes me a fair bit more reasonable than my political enemies.

Those are different forms of accountability, and I mean to keep them different. A prosecutor must prove an offense under law, rather than punish a person’s place in a political story. The rest of us remain free to decide that a person who defended abuse should no longer be trusted with influence, even when no criminal charge can properly be brought.

None of this authorizes immunity for my side or the persecution of ordinary voters. People who wield power must answer for how they use it, and those who lend that power respectability should face an honest account of what they defended. My anger does not entitle me to fabricate evidence, any more than their importance entitles them to suppress it.

The French declaration that made public officials accountable also presumed the accused innocent until judged guilty. I want both commitments kept when a powerful man finally faces a court. His rights must remain intact, and his power must cease to function as an additional defense.

There is room in this inheritance for beautiful buildings. I would like the courthouse to be beautiful, and I would like the people inside it to be able to reach a verdict without considering whether the defendant knows the president. Without that freedom, the quality of the stone is a poor consolation.

The men who imagine they own Western civilization should be made to understand what I mean to preserve. If the evidence warrants their prosecution, they will be entitled to counsel and a fair hearing, and the case against them will have to survive examination. They will not be entitled to make the question disappear.

If you’re on the left and feel gross about hoisting the flag and being proud of our great history of overcoming injustice, then you’re not welcome at the celebrations when we overcome this challenge, as far as I’m concerned.

Go Deeper into the Circus

You can spend your whole life lecturing people about incentives and still need someone to explain why a man might cheat if it pays. Donald Trump’s teleprompter operator was betting on what Donald Trump would say.

Gabriel Perez had access to the president’s speeches before they were delivered and used that access to trade contracts on whether particular words would appear, according to the Commodity Futures Trading Commission’s settlement order. The order found that he made more than $107,500 in profits from misappropriated information. His advantage over the people betting against him was that he had read the speech.

In August, the commission ordered him to surrender those profits and pay a $65,000 civil penalty, with a three-year trading ban. The exchange had detected the activity and reported it to federal regulators.

You know, it’s funny. I almost feel bad for the guy. His trading was unlawful, as the commission found, and he has to give the money back. Meanwhile, the president he worked for pardoned a man convicted of defrauding investors of more than $660 million. The teleprompter operator gets to demonstrate that the law still works. Someone with a much larger fraud gets a pardon.

You can call Perez’s trades voluntary if you like. I would be interested to know whether the people losing money would have agreed to them with the same information available.

On September 22, the commission’s market-oversight staff issued an advisory about the design of these contracts, warning that outcomes controlled by a small number of people create opportunities for manipulation and the misuse of advance knowledge. Among the preventive measures it discussed were restrictions on insider participation and position limits calibrated to make manipulation less attractive. The advisory explains existing obligations rather than imposing a new blanket ban, but its reasoning is useful: examine how the opportunity to cheat is constructed before inviting everyone to trade.

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On Friday, reporting on the Justice Department’s market integrity unit described a team that had fallen from more than 40 attorneys at the beginning of Trump’s second term to about 10. The administration’s new fraud division, with its emphasis on public-benefits cases, had drawn resources and senior personnel away from the team investigating market manipulation, according to former DOJ supervisors interviewed for the report.

In response, the department defended its remaining expertise and said the offices would share jurisdiction over securities cases. But jurisdiction is permission to do the work. Someone still has to do it.

Suppose you are considering a profitable fraud. Part of your calculation is whether anyone will discover it, and what will happen if they do. Making discovery less likely improves the proposition. You do not need a graduate degree to work this out, although apparently it is possible to acquire an entire political philosophy without getting that far.

An honest competitor has to live with the same calculation from the other side. If I can make more money by cheating than you can make by dealing honestly, and the chance of anyone stopping me keeps falling, your restraint becomes a competitive disadvantage. I can use the proceeds to expand while you explain to your customers why doing things properly costs more.

Telling the honest business owner to wait until the fraud is discovered is a particularly stupid answer when the capacity to discover it is being diminished. Even a successful prosecution cannot guarantee that the money will be recoverable or that the honest competitor will still be in business.

The Libertarian Party’s own platform says that “markets are not actually free unless fraud is vigorously combated”. I agree. A law against fraud needs more behind it than a declaration that fraud is wrong.

The threat of punishment can deter misconduct. It does not follow that we should rely on that threat alone, especially when the person taking the risk expects someone else to absorb the loss.

A central purpose of the Securities Act of 1933 is to require disclosure of significant information about securities offered for public sale, so investors can make an informed judgment. The 1934 act adds periodic reporting requirements for public companies. These laws do not make an investment safe or relieve the investor of judgment. They put obligations on the people asking for the money, rather than making the buyer responsible for discovering whatever the seller would prefer to conceal.

I have argued with libertarians who want to eliminate the SEC and leave this responsibility with prospective investors. Their answer is that private company-rating services would emerge, a kind of Consumer Reports for investing, and competition would make the arrangement better for everyone. I am supposed to find reassurance in the prediction that someone will sell me protection from the people selling me the investment.

An analyst can help me interpret a company’s disclosures. That does not answer whether the company is required to disclose the material facts accurately in the first place. A reputation for good analysis supplies no power to compel a dishonest firm to produce the information it is hiding. Telling the investor to exercise more personal responsibility does not make the missing information available.

We have also had private rating agencies. In its 2015 settlement with federal and state authorities, Standard & Poor’s acknowledged that business concerns affected decisions about its rating models and that it continued issuing positive ratings despite growing awareness of problems with the securities. Decisions about model updates were influenced in part by their effect on relationships with the issuers. The people selling judgments about risk had business interests capable of compromising those judgments.

That failure occurred within a regulated system; it does not prove that every possible private-rating model must fail. An investor-funded service could have different incentives. It would still need reliable access to the facts, and its clients would still need recourse if it deceived them. Announcing that a market for reassurance will emerge answers neither problem.

Private safeguards can do useful work, as the exchange’s role in catching Perez illustrates. But the investor should not have to discover that both the investment and the assurance were dishonest before the law has anything to say about the arrangement. Mandatory disclosure gives private analysis something to work with. Removing the obligation to disclose and promising that analysis will replace it is an invitation to concealment.

The market fundamentalist warns that preventive rules have costs and unintended consequences. Yes. So does leaving the opportunity for fraud intact. You do not get to count the cost of checking the books while treating the losses made possible by never checking them as somebody else’s subject.

Frédéric Bastiat’s What Is Seen and What Is Not Seen begins with a broken window: the glazier’s income is visible, while the things the shopkeeper can no longer buy with the money spent replacing the glass are not. His instruction is to follow the consequences beyond the transaction in front of you.

The compliance bill arrives, and someone can point to it. A customer whose savings were never stolen has no comparable invoice showing what the safeguard was worth. The absence of the fraud becomes an invitation to call the safeguard unnecessary.

Remove it, and the calculation changes. The company saves money immediately; the exposure created for its customers may take years to become apparent. Anyone who can explain Bastiat’s window should be capable of following that sequence without needing to be personally defrauded first.

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Even without fraud, a market can reward decisions that make sense for the person making them while producing a collective disaster. The claim that fewer restraints will yield more rational outcomes has to survive that possibility.

In The AI Trade is a Psyop, I argued that the rewards for promoting the AI story reinforce one another without establishing that the story is true. A venture capitalist can have a career to protect by getting into the next round. Someone buying the stock can expect to sell it to someone more enthusiastic. Joining the trade can make sense even to someone who doubts the premise. The incentive to avoid missing out supplies no missing evidence about the engineering.

You cannot answer that problem by pointing to how much money people are willing to put behind their beliefs. Their willingness to do so is part of what needs explaining. Nor does an eventual correction establish that the resources committed along the way were well used. A market capable of punishing an error after it has become enormous is not, on that account, a market that allocated resources rationally.

The promise that “pure capitalism” will produce better outcomes is a convenient one for someone already rich. It allows him to regard further freedom from public obligation as a contribution to everyone else’s prosperity. For someone struggling to get by, the same promise offers a future in which he will join the wealthy, once the people standing in capitalism’s way have been defeated. His difficulty paying the rent becomes evidence that society is not capitalist enough.

Within that story, a well-meaning person who tries to protect him from exploitation can be made responsible for his hardship. The protection introduced a “market distortion.” Without it, he is invited to believe, the abundance would finally arrive. It is an excellent way to persuade someone with very little money to identify his interests with a person who wants fewer restrictions on how much can be taken from him.

I am suspicious of the judgment being smuggled into that word, “distortion.” Distorted compared with what? Showing that a rule changes a market outcome does not establish that the outcome without it would be more just, or even that it would leave people better off. Calling a safeguard a distortion can spare you the trouble of explaining why the freedom it restricts deserves precedence over the person it protects.

Whether a particular rule makes life more expensive, and whether its benefits justify its costs, are questions to investigate. Name the rule and make the case. The existence of a bad regulation does not make every attempt to protect people an obstacle to the prosperity they have been promised.

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Anyone asking us to rely on punishment after the fact also has to reckon with the president’s willingness to cancel it. Trevor Milton was convicted by a jury of securities fraud and two counts of wire fraud after deceiving investors about his truck company’s technology. He received a four-year prison sentence, and Trump pardoned him on March 27, 2025. Having established the fraud, the government was prevented by the president from carrying out the punishment.

In an October 7 report, the watchdog group Public Citizen identified more than 200 corporations that had benefited from the cancellation of enforcement actions inherited from the Biden administration. Its tally covers alleged misconduct as well as previously resolved cases; it is not a list of 200 convicted corporations, a distinction the report expressly acknowledges.

You cannot read that record alongside the loss of investigative capacity and reasonably assume the only people gaining freedom are honest businesses relieved of unnecessary paperwork. The person who wants to cheat benefits too. So does anyone hoping their misconduct will remain an allegation nobody gets around to proving.

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Michael Saylor told the Atlas Society’s 2022 gala, “We say in the Bitcoin world: Fix the money, fix the world”. In the same speech, he called Bitcoin “the best choice we have to save our civilization”. That is a promise about how people will live together. It cannot be defended simply by pointing to a property of the money.

A fraud paid for in bitcoin is still a fraud. Nothing about the currency establishes whether the seller told the truth, or whether a public official serving the buyer’s interests was bribed. Those questions still require evidence and institutions capable of acting on it. You do not get to dismiss that work as interference and then claim your preferred money has made it unnecessary.

Trump’s offer to the Bitcoin conference in Nashville in July 2024 was less mysterious. “The rules will be written by people who love your industry, not hate your industry,” he told the audience. Anyone who understood regulatory capture should have recognized something worth objecting to in the promise that an industry’s admirers would write its rules.

If you backed that bargain while crowing “fix the money, fix the world,” you owe us an account of the world you helped choose. You cannot point to the usefulness of a payment system when the question is why you supported a politician offering your industry favorable treatment. The political decision was yours. No protocol made it for you.

The prospect of your own enrichment was supposed to coincide with humanity’s liberation. Yet when the practical question became whether powerful people should be constrained, the bargain offered you a place among the favored. Calling that freedom does not oblige the people outside your industry to mistake it for theirs.

I am tired of being lectured about incentives by people who recognize every danger in government power until that power offers to serve them. You promised to fix the world. Explain why the people in it should accept weaker protection from fraud as part of the repair.

I expect the libertarian marketing apparatus to spend the coming years teaching Americans that universal healthcare, taxes on the rich and welfare programs will harm them. The YouTube videos will be beautifully produced. Someone will explain Bastiat and Hayek to an audience being invited to feel smarter than the people asking for help. There will be another reverent performance of the pencil story Friedman popularized, as though explaining how strangers cooperate to manufacture stationery settles whether a corporation should have to disclose what it is selling you. It will be very stupid, and I will be there to call it so.

In Clear Thinking v. Ayn Rand, I wrote: “Objectivism is actually stupid. It’s a stupid philosophy.” I am prepared to extend that judgment to right-libertarianism. We should absolutely fucking regulate markets.

Go Deeper into the Circus

Trump and MAGA will fail. I expect the economy to get worse, and I think their ability to persuade Americans to blame everyone else is wearing out. Someone who agrees with that assessment can nevertheless decide to keep helping them until withdrawing becomes the safer choice.

In its survey conducted from September 28 through October 4, Pew found that 30 percent of Americans approved of Trump’s job performance, while 68 percent disapproved. For a politician hoping to survive Trump, those numbers may look like a reason to prepare an exit. But preparing to leave can mean continuing to vote with him while waiting for the political cost of leaving to fall.

I think a lot of people are going to regret having stood in photographs with Trump in the Oval Office. Especially anyone choosing to do it now. You may already be thinking about how you will explain the picture later, but Trump gets to use it today.

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If you are a Republican in Congress who understands what this administration is doing and continues to protect it, I would like you to explain whose interests your patience serves. You can tell me about the primary challenge you fear. I will understand you perfectly well, and I will still want to know why someone else should endure the consequences of your decision to avoid it.

You were elected to exercise judgment. The possibility that exercising it might cost you your seat was part of the arrangement, and I do not accept that preserving your career takes precedence over protecting the people subjected to the power you help sustain.

Perhaps you believe you can accomplish more by staying close to the president. Then your defense needs to include something you have actually prevented, because the access itself is of no interest to the person whose rights are being violated. If you cannot explain what your influence has accomplished, I am left looking at your continued cooperation.

A chief executive can make much the same argument about protecting a company. But if keeping the business in favor requires helping officials harm people, then protecting the business has become a decision about what you are willing to do to those people. Calling it a responsibility to shareholders does not relieve you of responsibility for the choice.

“I was protecting shareholder value” tells me why you wanted the arrangement to continue. It gives me no reason to forgive what you did to preserve it.

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Refusing can cost you something. I have written about what it cost me, and I am tired of having the existence of that cost explained as though it resolves the argument.

The person who cannot afford to lose a paycheck is in a different position from the person who can afford to lose a fortune and remain wealthy. A senator’s fear of losing office deserves less sympathy than a family’s fear of the government. I will judge the choices available to each, and I will not help the powerful borrow the helplessness of people who have far less room to act.

If you have substantial power and are withholding it until you can act without personal risk, you have decided that the people currently being harmed should bear the risk for you. They get to live through the interval in which you are preserving your options. Your eventual statement of opposition will not give them that time back.

I would welcome your decision to stop cooperating. Every refusal that makes further abuse more difficult has value, including one made by someone who should have refused much earlier. But I will judge it by what you stop doing and what you help stop, rather than by how eloquently you describe your disappointment.

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The Associated Press reports that ICE agents have fired their guns during more than a dozen vehicle stops since last year, killing at least four people and wounding others. Each shooting requires an examination of its circumstances. Officials responsible for oversight should be demanding those answers now, while their findings could prevent another death.

A person in an office of public trust who is waiting for everyone else to break first is helping maintain the support he says makes breaking impossible. His colleagues can point to his continued cooperation as a reason to maintain theirs. They can all privately believe the administration is finished while publicly helping it remain in power.

Breaking with it gives those colleagues something to join. It also forces them to decide whether they will defend conduct that someone in their own circle has refused to defend. The person waiting until opposition is safe is waiting for someone else to do that work for him.

You may believe that holding out for another month will let you leave on better terms. But you are making that calculation from a position in which another month is something you can afford. Someone subjected to the power you are helping preserve has no way to negotiate how much of that month they can endure.

Even if everything I expect about this administration’s failure comes to pass, an earlier refusal could still have spared someone. The day you finally decide to act matters to a person whose life might have been different had you decided yesterday.

Trump’s eventual defeat will not make the time you gave him harmless. The blood is dripping from the hands of those who could stop him and won’t. I think people should reconsider that. But I’m not holding my breath. They all seem like pretty shitty people, all things considered.

Go Deeper into the Circus

I do not want to lower the temperature. I think the people responsible ought to feel increasing public pressure until they stop hurting people and answer for what they have done.

Yesterday, a federal immigration officer shot Oscar Belgal in New York while a five-year-old boy was in his car. According to New York Police Commissioner Jessica Tisch, a plainclothes officer approached with their sidearm drawn, followed by another officer. Belgal began pulling the car forward, and at least one officer fired seven rounds, hitting him below the left ear. He survived, and the child was physically unharmed.

The Department of Homeland Security’s hastily-released statement described his criminal record, including a grand larceny conviction, while saying only that “during the incident, an ICE officer discharged his weapon.” NBC New York also reports DHS’s allegation that Belgal “rammed” ICE vehicles as officers tried to box him in.

That allegation needs to be tested against the evidence, and an imminent threat would matter to the judgment of the shooting. Belgal’s criminal record cannot establish what happened in those seconds. The government owes us an account of why its officer fired, not an invitation to care less about the person he shot.

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I hate what ICE is doing to this country, and I do not respect the job its agents are doing. Telling me it is a hard, thankless job does not answer my objection to what they are being paid to do to other people.

When a demand to lower the temperature turns the discussion toward the critic’s anger, it protects the officials who should be answering for their conduct. They can continue doing what they were doing while we debate whether the person objecting has become too hostile. I will not help them by treating my anger as the problem that needs to be resolved.

When you help the administration carry out a policy, you have done more than express an opinion about it. The people subjected to that policy have to live with what you helped make happen, and their objections do not become less legitimate because they make your work more difficult.

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The Bulwark’s Tim Miller recently took on Democrats hesitating to investigate Trump’s corporate allies. The reporting he was responding to described a disagreement over how far corporate investigations should go, while noting that Democrats supported aggressive oversight of the administration.

I endorse Miller’s response: Congress has to investigate to distinguish companies subjected to pressure from those that willingly profited from corruption. Offering leniency for the circumstances of someone’s participation while declining to establish those circumstances is a decision to protect someone you have not investigated.

An investigation should follow evidence of wrongdoing wherever it leads. The prospect that its findings might spoil a working relationship is no reason to stop it. A Democrat who trades accountability for bipartisan comity is offering forgiveness for harm done to other people.

Any Democrat who wants to let bygones be bygones might as well declare themselves MAGA, as far as I am concerned. A Democrat who acquires investigative power and chooses to shield wrongdoing is responsible for that decision, and should expect to be judged for it.

And if you are an American citizen who would rather let bygones be bygones so we can move on and focus on economic issues, you are a selfish citizen. You are asking other people to give up their demand for accountability so politics can return to the subjects you care about.

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I will not separate my authentic and valid emotions from this discussion because a certain detached intellectual aesthetic asks it of me. The ability to discuss someone else’s suffering without getting upset does not establish that you have understood it better. Sometimes it means you have found a way to keep it from troubling you.

An error in my account needs to be identified and corrected. Describing my temperament does neither, and a composed defense of the government still has to survive an examination of what the government did.

I intend to make their conduct harder to defend in public and more costly to continue politically. If the officials responsible and the people helping them refuse to stop, the public confrontation should grow.

In The Crisis, No. 1, I wrote: “We do not need to overthrow the government. We need to insist that the government follow its own laws.” There is no obligation to make that insistence pleasant for the officials resisting it.

Where those responsible have committed crimes, I want them prosecuted, with the same due process the administration owes everyone else. Losing office is not an answer to evidence of a crime.

The people exercising powers in positions of public trust should submit to the law. They should also be held to a basic standard of decency that does not depend on whether a lawyer can find a way to keep them out of prison. I will not accept continued abuse in exchange for a more agreeable relationship with the people carrying it out.

No, there is no moving on until the harm stops, there is accountability and history is made to remember these crimes.

I stand by these words and I seek confrontation with those who stand against their meaning.

Go Deeper into the Circus

Eric Schmitt had reached the part of his interrogation where he warned Jack Smith about committing perjury. He had not yet established which basketball game Smith had attended, but apparently that could wait.

At Tuesday’s Senate Judiciary Committee hearing, Schmitt suggested that Smith had attended an Atlanta Hawks game in February 2024, placing him in the city where Fani Willis was pursuing her own case against Donald Trump. He produced a poster containing text messages and told Smith, “I think you’ve already perjured yourself.”

Smith remembered attending a women’s basketball game in Maryland, where Caitlin Clark was playing for the Iowa Hawkeyes. The game was in College Park, not Atlanta. This presented a difficulty for the senator’s theory of what Smith had been doing in Atlanta.

The following day, asked whether he regretted calling Smith a liar, Schmitt answered: “He has lied before to Congress.” His explanation for the basketball mistake concluded, “I didn’t know he was a Caitlin Clark fan. Now we know.”

Schmitt offered another accusation as a reason he need not regret making the first. And attending a game in Atlanta would not have established that Smith met Willis, much less that they conspired to abuse their offices.

But Smith and Willis were both trying to get Trump, you see. What else would they be doing?

I think there is a confession in that expectation. If you regard a public office as an opportunity to reward your friends and punish the people you hate, why would someone with the means to get a desired result allow an ethical obligation to interfere? You would know what to do with the opportunity, and you assume they do too.

In that account, Smith cannot simply have done his job. His insistence that he did becomes part of the concealment, and the absence of evidence becomes a reason to look for something he has hidden.

Perhaps Schmitt merely knows his audience will believe it. Either way, he was willing to threaten a man with prosecution before checking whether the denial he called perjury was true.

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Trump accused Hillary Clinton of giving away American uranium rights in exchange for donations to the Clinton Foundation. In the Uranium One affair, too, he failed to establish that anyone had bought a government decision.

Investors connected to Uranium One had donated to the foundation, and the foundation acknowledged mistakes in its disclosures. Those donors’ interests in government decisions were a perfectly good reason to scrutinize the arrangement.

But the 2010 transaction, through which Russia’s Rosatom acquired a controlling interest in the company, went through a nine-member interagency review as well as separate regulatory approvals. The State Department’s representative, Jose Fernandez, said Clinton “never intervened with me on any C.F.I.U.S. matter.” Neither the donations nor the failure to disclose them established that Clinton had sold a decision.

Disliking the Clintons did not relieve anyone alleging bribery of the obligation to establish the bribe. But try explaining that to someone who thinks your refusal to assume guilt reveals something suspicious about you.

Once you have accepted that everyone exercises power this way, you can excuse almost anything your own side does. Refusing to do it begins to look like a willingness to lose.

Some of the people I worked with in Bitcoin were convinced that liberals secretly wanted permanent lockdowns. I spoke to one of them at length over drinks. He believed they wanted total control over people’s lives, and he was very convinced that he understood them. And yes, that was very deranged.

You could believe restrictions had outlasted their justification without believing liberals wanted them to last forever. He was attributing to them a desire to keep everyone confined even after the public-health justification disappeared.

Concern about disease would be what they said to conceal that ambition. Even lifting a restriction could be understood as something they had been forced to concede, rather than a reason to reconsider what you believed they wanted.

He was as confident about other people’s secret desires as he might have been about something they had actually told him. How do you discuss a policy with someone who believes its stated purpose is a lie you are either helping tell or too foolish to recognize?

I personally think this level of social paranoia should be pathologized. But that’s just me.

Unfortunately, these people can now start podcasts and call it “alternative media.” The bullshit you heard over drinks can become the explanation the establishment refuses to give you, and asking for evidence can get you dismissed as someone who still trusts the establishment.

After the hearing, Andrew Kolvet praised Schmitt on The Charlie Kirk Show: “Good for you on that,” and “Gotta give you some flowers for that, sir.” Kolvet described Smith as acting “dumbfounded and completely clueless.”

Smith had been confronted with a story about something he had not done. His confusion could now be offered as further grounds for ridicule, while the person responsible for the false accusation received congratulations.

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On September 20, 2025, Donald Trump publicly pressed Pam Bondi over the absence of charges against his adversaries, including James Comey and Letitia James. “We can’t delay any longer, it’s killing our reputation and credibility,” he wrote, before invoking his own treatment: “They impeached me twice, and indicted me (5 times!), OVER NOTHING.”

According to the same reporting, Erik Siebert, the prosecutor whose office was investigating Comey and James, had told officials he did not believe the evidence was strong enough to bring charges. Trump announced that he was replacing him with his own former attorney, Lindsey Halligan, whom he wanted “to get things moving.”

You do not have to reconstruct a basketball itinerary to establish that the president was pressuring his attorney general. His grievance could establish nothing about his opponents’ guilt, but he wanted action.

If Smith was secretly doing the same thing, you can tell yourself Trump is retaliating. You do not even have to establish the accusation against Smith before putting it to work in Trump’s defense.

If you believe political interference with prosecution is wrong, a president making this demand should trouble you. Telling me Democrats started it does not explain why I should accept it. Even proof of an earlier abuse would give you a reason to stop it, not an entitlement to arrange another.

And these were people who felt safer with Trump in charge. They could see a desire for total control concealed inside a public-health argument, but somehow felt reassured by putting him in power. I think that was a fucking moronic judgment.

Then people who believe this bullshit turn around and diagnose people like me with a “derangement syndrome.” I was worried about a man using presidential power against his enemies. Now he is publicly pressing his attorney general to pursue those enemies, and somehow the conversation is still supposed to be about what is wrong with me.

On that question, I got it right. They got it wrong. And yet they still feel qualified to explain what’s wrong with my judgment.

What would have to happen before they reconsidered? The conduct I warned about can occur without disturbing their belief that I was deranged to warn about it. They can keep their account of me and never have to revise their account of themselves.

I think that is insane. And I am tired of being asked to treat people reasoning this way as the sober participants in a conversation they have made almost impossible to have.

Asked afterward whether he still thought Smith had committed perjury, Schmitt told NBC: “We’ll find out. That’s going to be up to a prosecutor to determine.” Smith had denied being at a game he had not attended, and the senator who accused him still refused to close the question of whether that denial was a crime.

Go Deeper into the Circus

You were terrified that Donald Trump would win in November 2024. And before the result, you understood enough about him that you wanted him kept far from power. You did not need someone to explain why.

I am writing to that person who remembers that specific fear and has since found a miraculous way to live comfortably inside the thing they feared. Within what seemed like moments of Trump being declared winner, going along began to seem more sensible than continuing to object. You had a life to get on with, and the objections were making it difficult.

What did you learn about him after he won that you had somehow failed to understand when you were frightened he might? I would like an answer that concerns him, because I already understand why it became inconvenient for you to keep objecting. That part of the transformation is hardly a mystery.

Maybe you are one of my former friends, someone I told off in person or in a text you still have. And yes, I was angry, which I imagine made it easier to spend the conversation thinking about what had happened to me.

But I would like you to remember what you thought was going to happen to the country. My anger did not put that fear in you, and explaining my anger does nothing to explain how you became comfortable with what you had already understood.

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In a clip Acyn circulated yesterday, Jensen Huang corrected himself: “We want to advance AI,” followed by “advance SI. I’m gonna get good at this.” And I suppose he will, since this is one benchmark whose requirements are perfectly clear.

Donald Trump’s September 29 executive order directs executive agencies to replace “Artificial Intelligence” with “Super Intelligence” in their communications and nonstatutory documents, to the maximum extent permitted by law. If you were wondering what technological achievement earned the promotion, Section 3 of the order initially gives the new term the existing statutory definition of artificial intelligence, with sixty days allowed for proposed legislative language establishing a new definition. So the name has improved, and someone will get around to explaining what it means.

I find the performance humiliating, and nothing about that judgment requires me to pretend Huang has stopped being intelligent. A person can retain all the intelligence that made him successful and put it to work figuring out how to please a fool. He may even become quite good at explaining why people who object do not understand the responsibilities of someone in his position.

At the White House gathering, the companies agreed to a voluntary accord involving internal controls and independent external auditors, with committees of their own boards evaluating the reports. Trump described the commitment as “morally binding” and promised “a tremendous self-policing aspect.” Those measures could do useful work, provided the people receiving an unwelcome finding are prepared to do something about it even when doing so threatens an arrangement they would prefer to preserve.

Perhaps you laughed at the clip, and then explained to someone that Huang has a business to protect. Well, yes. That is a perfectly intelligible account of why he might go along, and it leaves us with the question of what else protecting the business will eventually require him to go along with.

Somewhere, presumably, there is a demand you would refuse even if refusal became expensive. I wonder whether the person you were before November 2024 would recognize where you have decided to put that limit.

Upton Sinclair wrote: “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!” And the difficulty becomes especially interesting when the man understood perfectly well until his circumstances made it preferable that he didn’t.

A person can work their way through this without ever having a conversation with themselves in which they decide to become dishonest. The concession seems temporary, and staying useful seems more responsible than making some grand gesture that will accomplish nothing. You intend to demonstrate the usefulness later, while the concession is something you have already made.

In the meantime, the people who continue objecting become increasingly difficult to be around, because they keep bringing the original question back into a life you have worked very hard to make bearable. Their refusal to move on begins to look like a problem with them. And once the problem is that they are too emotional, you have a way of explaining the unpleasantness without having to revisit what you did.

I do not know every conversation you had with yourself, and I am not pretending there could have been no serious obligations involved. If losing your job would put someone dependent on you at risk, then of course that belongs in an honest account of the choice. But you can tell the truth about being constrained without teaching yourself that the conduct you feared has somehow become acceptable.

When you start telling other people that they are unreasonable for continuing to object, you are asking them to make the accommodation with you. Your need to get through the day has become a reason somebody else should stop protesting, which is quite a demand to make of someone whose judgment you once shared.

I understand wanting to sleep at night. But I am not going to help you by pretending that the person you were before the election was foolish to be afraid.

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This morning, I wrote that none of the terrible predictions I have watched come true required some exceptional intellect to make. They required not lying to myself, and I have been watching with a certain morbid amusement as the things I was told I was unreasonable to fear become things we are expected to accept. I would much rather have had less to be right about.

In February 2025, I wrote “The Plot Against America” about the alliance between people who regarded democratic government as an obstacle and a president willing to attack its constraints. I saw no reason to assume that being good at building technology would make them responsible with political power, and the argument was there for anyone who wanted to explain where I had gone wrong.

Of course I can be wrong. But telling me that I am angry does not identify the error, and I am tired of being offered an account of my temperament by people who seem to think they have thereby answered what I wrote.

One former colleague, who I like, said to me: “Honestly, my impression is not that you’re not being principled. People think you are just angry and lashing out and are dismissing you because they think you’re too emotional.”

I replied: “Good. Have them go on thinking that. Tell them I approve of their dismissal.” Once I had written them off, I stopped wanting to convince them of anything or spending time worrying about their interpretation of me.

There are people whose approval I no longer want back, and it seems to be taking some time for that fact to become clear. The argument remains available if they want to read it. Making my disapproval comfortable enough for them to reconsider is no longer something I regard as my responsibility.

I’ll tell you what my line was: the moment I realized that my personal gain was coming at the cost of harm to others and I could not dismiss that, I changed my mind. Acting on that realization cost me dearly. I lost nearly every friend and lost my career. But more importantly, I gained myself.

So yes, I know there is a cost, and you are not going to resolve our disagreement by patiently explaining that fact to me. What I would like you to explain is why the obligations we claimed to believe in became negotiable just as we were being asked to honor them.

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You do not have to be a chief executive to encounter a concern that is technically sound and professionally unwelcome. And if remaining useful means revising your judgment until the concern becomes something everyone can comfortably disregard, then the people relying on your judgment have a problem that your intelligence will do very little to solve.

Being intelligent can help you recognize a danger, but it can also help you produce an exceptionally persuasive explanation for why confronting it ought to be someone else’s responsibility. I would like to know who that someone is supposed to be, and why they should accept a cost you have decided is unreasonable to ask of you.

Having a principle means holding it when it might cost you something. Especially when it costs you something. If your defense of acquiescence is that resistance would have threatened your interests, you have described the test you failed.

When you abandon a judgment because you are afraid of what maintaining it will cost, I think cowardice is a perfectly reasonable word for the decision. I don’t see why a sophisticated explanation should spare it the moral judgment we would apply to a friend who withdrew their solidarity as soon as having it required something of them.

And if you are a parent, you owe your children more than a comfortable home inside a country whose protections you helped weaken. They are going to have to live in that country, and the question of whether they can speak freely or refuse the demands of someone more powerful will matter long after anyone remembers the professional advantage you were trying to preserve.

You can leave them a larger inheritance and still have been a bad steward of the future they will inhabit. They were not consulted about the trade you were making on their behalf, and I would be careful about assuming they will be grateful for it.

You still have to decide whether you will keep defending what you once recognized as dangerous, and what you are prepared to withhold from it. But I am asking what you will do while doing it still costs something, rather than after the arrangement becomes embarrassing enough that leaving it can pass for another sensible career decision.

You owe the future an apology for your acquiescence to evil, and it should not have to wait until the arrangement stops paying. Before you explain to your children why you went along, remember how frightened you were that he might win.

So some of you will read this and have a query: Does Mike think he’s better than I? If you fit into the grouping of moral scorn I have forthwith laid out to you, the answer is an unqualified yes.

Go Deeper into the Circus

Listening to The Dispatch Podcast this morning, I heard Kevin Williamson explain how failing to appear at a court hearing can get you thrown in jail in America. The discussion concerned a former patient of Roger Marshall, now a Republican senator, who says she was arrested while eight months pregnant during a medical-debt collection case.

I have a slight grudge against Steve Hayes. In his interview with Andy Mills, Hayes framed my analysis as a “conspiracy theory,” while acknowledging elements of truth; Mills used the term “conspiracy theorist.” Readers can revisit “The Plot Against America” and judge that argument for themselves.

Despite intense disagreements, I have a soft spot for Jonah Goldberg. I do think he’s trying to be intellectually honest. And credit to him here, because he seemed to think it was ridiculous that a woman who was eight months pregnant was jailed under these circumstances.

Williamson described failing to appear at a court hearing as “an excellent way to get yourself arrested.” Well, maybe it shouldn’t be so easy to put someone in jail. People can understand a procedure and still object to what it does.

Marshall’s lawyers say Meischa Zimmerman was arrested for missing a court appearance, rather than a payment, and that the underlying debt was roughly $3,600, not $50. Neither distinction establishes that incarceration was proportionate.

What is a court supposed to do when someone fails to show up? Kansas law expressly allows a court to enter a default judgment when a defendant fails to answer or appear. A civil case need not stop because the defendant is absent.

Missing a later hearing to enforce that judgment is a different matter. Kansas provides for hearings about a debtor’s property and income, and contempt proceedings for failure to attend. Default judgment is not a substitute for those proceedings. But a defense of incarceration requires more than the observation that the court has business to conduct.

Williamson acknowledged that it was “a bad look”, then compared it with arrests arising from other obligations, including parking tickets.

The Justice Department’s 2015 Ferguson investigation documented a woman whose two parking citations began with a $151 fine, plus fees. Over seven years, she was arrested twice and spent six days in jail; by December 2014, she had paid $550 and still owed $541. The court had even refused her attempts at partial payment.

In its work on fines-and-fees enforcement, the Justice Department has documented job loss and escalating debt that can trap people in poverty. Research by the Brennan Center describes incarceration depriving families of a wage earner while additional costs accumulate. A system demanding payment can destroy the means of paying.

Williamson offered parking tickets as though their familiarity should make the jail cell less objectionable. I think that reflects badly on his judgment. The comparison should have made him more curious about what happens to the people subjected to these practices, rather than more confident that the rest of us needed a civics lesson.

I grew up among conservatives. This dry, procedural response to someone else’s suffering is familiar to me: the law is the law, and the person suffering should have known better. I think it is one of the worst habits of the conservative mind. It allows a refusal to examine the rule to pass for seriousness about the world.

In 2024, 90 percent of voters who identified as conservative voted for Donald Trump. By Election Day, a jury had already found him guilty of thirty-four felonies. His opponent had served as California’s attorney general.

I do not think a prosecutor’s resume obliges anyone to vote for her. But a movement that overwhelmingly preferred the convicted candidate has demonstrated that a court’s judgment need not settle its own political judgment.

Goldberg, to his credit, called Trump’s violation of the peaceful transfer of power “inherently disqualifying” and said ending his hold on the Republican Party was worth a Harris presidency. His refusal to vote for either candidate in the District of Columbia came with an explicit rejection of neutrality about the outcome.

Trump was entitled to challenge his conviction, and voters were entitled to assess his objections. Someone concerned about a pregnant woman’s incarceration is entitled to question the use of legal authority too. That capacity for judgment should not disappear when the person subjected to the law has less power than the people discussing her.

For most of my adult life, I listened to conservatives complain that the mainstream press refused to see the decent people beneath the caricature. Reporters mistook conviction for bigotry. They let the loudest cranks stand for a movement whose respectable core deserved a fair hearing.

Journalists can misunderstand people outside their own social world. But the complaint asked us to keep believing in a conservatism that would impose limits on the people acting in its name. How much longer were we supposed to wait?

In February 2022, the Republican National Committee formally censured Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger for their work on the House committee investigating January 6. Its resolution accused them of supporting efforts to destroy Trump more than they supported winning back a Republican majority, and pledged to cease supporting them as party members.

Here were conservatives willing to impose a limit. The party had located them and decided they were the problem.

According to the resolution, the pair were participating in a persecution of citizens engaged in “legitimate political discourse.” Ronna McDaniel subsequently said that description referred to conduct unrelated to violence at the Capitol, a distinction the resolution itself did not make.

Even granting her clarification, the disciplinary decision remained. A national party that punished its members for investigating an attack on Congress was instructing its respectable faction to stop.

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In February 2017, after Trump honored the widow of Navy SEAL William “Ryan” Owens during his address to Congress, CNN commentator Van Jones said, “He became president of the United States in that moment, period.” Jones was praising a particular moment, not endorsing the administration. Yet performing a familiar presidential ritual had earned Trump a declaration of transformation.

In April, after Trump ordered a missile strike on Syria, Fareed Zakaria said on CNN: “I think Donald Trump became President of the United States” the previous night. He explained that Trump had begun invoking international norms and America’s responsibility to enforce them, describing “a kind of education of Donald Trump.”

One could favor the strike without concluding that the president had changed. Other journalists mocked these declarations at the time. The press was never unanimous. But Trump could receive credit toward rehabilitation without first accounting for the conduct that made rehabilitation necessary.

The expectation of a responsible core works much the same way. It allows every new offense to be assessed against the principles a movement professes, with the discrepancy treated as another departure from its true character. Eventually, the repetition ought to change our account of the character.

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Republican leaders have no difficulty questioning a legal process when it threatens one of their own. In a June 2023 letter to Merrick Garland, Jim Jordan complained that Trump would be indicted “despite declining to indict” Hillary Clinton, and described at least an appearance of a double standard and a miscarriage of justice.

When Trump was indicted over efforts to overturn the 2020 election, Tim Scott responded by invoking Hunter Biden: “What we see today are two different tracks of justice. One for political opponents and another for the son of the current president.”

I have heard versions of this argument from conservative friends and family for years. Before we can discuss what a Republican did, we are expected to settle whether some Democrat has been punished sufficiently. Fair is fair, apparently.

Whether Hillary Clinton or Hunter Biden committed a crime cannot establish that Donald Trump did not. Evidence of selective prosecution deserves examination, but it requires an argument about comparable conduct and unequal treatment. Counting defendants by party supplies neither. Impartial enforcement has no obligation to produce an equal number of defendants from each party.

Obtaining a conviction does not satisfy the objection either. After Trump’s New York verdict, Marco Rubio denounced a “political show trial” and included among his complaints “a jury from the most liberal county in America”.

A defendant can challenge a jury’s impartiality. But how a county votes does not establish that its jurors disregarded the evidence. Dismissing the verdict on that basis turns a demand for due process into a demand for a process that cannot return the wrong answer.

The supposed Democratic abuse then became a justification for Republican retaliation. On September 20, 2025, Trump publicly pressed Pam Bondi to pursue his adversaries, citing his own treatment: “They impeached me twice, and indicted me (5 times!), OVER NOTHING.”

After James Comey’s indictment, the Washington Times editorial board opened its defense by contrasting his treatment with what it asserted Democrats did to their opponents: “They place septuagenarian suspects in leg irons, just because.” It credited Trump with doing none of that.

A president’s grievance does not establish evidence against the people he wants charged. Anyone who believed partisan prosecution was wrong when Trump complained of it owes the same objection when Trump demands it. If Democrats abused prosecutorial power, that would be a reason to stop the abuse. “They started it” gives each administration permission for the next round.

Earlier that year, on January 20, Trump commuted fourteen sentences and issued sweeping pardons for offenses connected to January 6, while directing the dismissal of pending cases. The clemency included people convicted of violently assaulting police officers.

His proclamation described its purpose as ending “a grave national injustice” perpetrated on the American people. The injustice being remedied was the prosecution of the people who had participated in the attack.

Put that decision beside the censure of Cheney and Kinzinger. The people who helped investigate the attack received the party’s formal condemnation. People convicted of attacking police received presidential clemency. No theory about a journalist’s cultural prejudices explains away that allocation of punishment and protection.

A person can dislike an act and still decide that preserving their political alliance matters more than opposing it. Their private reservations do not withdraw the support on which the institution depends. Cheney and Kinzinger accepted consequences for withholding theirs. Their colleagues had that choice too.

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Reporting need not presume the worst of every Republican. It should stop treating a Republican’s stated principles as evidence that the next decision will be better than the last.

An interview can ask whether a scandal will cost votes. It should also ask what an official did about it when they had the power to act. Giving someone a fair hearing includes the possibility of concluding that their explanation fails.

The conservative complaint asked us to distinguish its worst elements from its respectable core. Its leadership issued the censure and the pardons. Continuing to treat that conduct as unrepresentative requires a conservatism that exists somewhere other than where conservatives exercise power.

I am tired of being asked to find the better conservatism concealed behind the conservatism that governs. The people who resisted deserve credit for resisting, and someone who voices discomfort deserves a fair account of what they said. Respectability has to require something more of the rest than a composed explanation of how an objectionable thing came to happen.

Go Deeper into the Circus

Sorry for the third essay today. I have a weed up my ass, and the political podcasts are responsible. Listening to them is part of my media monitoring, and the AI conversations have become painful enough that I need to interrupt your afternoon.

A guest arrives to explain superintelligence. Before anyone has established what intelligence means in the argument, we are discussing what will happen when something has vastly more of it than we do. The listener is offered a comparison with animals. Look at what humans can do to them. Now imagine being the animal.

At this point I would like the host to ask a fucking question. Which properties of the animal are we attributing to the software? How were those properties established? If the answer is that the software will be much smarter, we have returned to the word whose meaning we skipped.

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The comparison has a pedigree. In a 2015 NPR interview, Nick Bostrom explained that intelligence accounts for our power relative to other animals, then said: “If we create machines that exceed human intelligence then those machines also could be very powerful relative to us.” His example was the fate of gorillas, which depends on what humans do.

For the listener, the gorilla supplies a picture of helplessness. It does not establish which capacities would produce that relationship between us and a machine. To do that, the argument has to identify what the machine can accomplish and explain how those accomplishments become power over people who may oppose it.

Instead, the version that keeps irritating me treats intelligence as a quantity we can pour into a vessel until it becomes our master. Better at a task becomes generally smarter. Generally smarter becomes able to pursue a future of its own choosing. By the time the conversation reaches our extinction, several separate claims have been compressed into a comparative adjective.

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There are serious attempts to define intelligence. In The Measure of Intelligence, François Chollet proposes “skill-acquisition efficiency” and argues that performance at a given task is insufficient because training and prior knowledge can mask a system’s ability to generalize. That is a proposal with assumptions a reader can examine.

Bostrom adopts a different working definition in The Superintelligent Will: intelligence roughly corresponds to the capacity for instrumental reasoning. He is concerned with how effectively a system can find means to an end.

A podcast guest who wants to rank humans and machines should tell us what is being ranked. Performance on familiar tasks need not measure how efficiently a system learns unfamiliar ones. Neither measure, without further argument, tells us whether the system experiences anything or has interests of its own.

We can evaluate software without solving the philosophy of mind. The evaluation has to support the claim being made. If the claim is that a system completes a particular class of tasks reliably, show the tests. Telling us that we are about to become the livestock of a superior form of intelligence requires considerably more explaining.

A proper intelligence benchmark therefore needs an account of what intelligence is, and an argument for why the test measures it. Its designers need not settle every philosophical dispute. They do have to state which questions their design answers and which it leaves open. Write that account down so we can examine it. Where researchers have done so, as Chollet has, the conversation should engage the argument rather than skip to the leaderboard.

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OpenAI’s charter defines AGI as “highly autonomous systems that outperform humans at most economically valuable work.” That might be a useful target for a company selling automation. It tells us to investigate a system’s ability to perform work people value economically. How that becomes an adequate account of intelligence remains a question.

Suppose a system becomes exceptionally good at selling people something they do not need. Its commercial performance could be impressive. That tells us neither whether the people buying are better off nor whether the system understands what it is doing. Those are different questions from whether someone can make money with it.

I wish Derek Parfit were alive for this conversation. In Reasons and Persons, he asks what makes a person’s life go well and examines why even satisfying a desire need not straightforwardly establish a benefit to the person who has it. Anyone proposing to measure human benefit ought to be able to explain how their measure handles that distinction.

His repugnant conclusion exposes a further difficulty: maximizing total welfare can rank a sufficiently vast population of lives barely worth living above a smaller population of flourishing people. I intend to give that problem a proper treatment, particularly what it means for proposals to build AI around a mathematized utilitarian ethics. For now, I would like anyone proposing such a system to explain why we should accept its moral premises. Executing them flawlessly could be precisely what we have reason to fear.

OpenAI’s charter does distinguish its capability definition from its mission to benefit humanity. Keep that distinction in the interview. Economic performance requires an argument before it becomes a measure of intelligence, and a further argument before it becomes a measure of human benefit. The revenue cannot answer those questions for you.

In its guide to building effective agents, Anthropic describes agents as “typically just LLMs using tools based on environmental feedback in a loop.” A model produces a proposed action, a tool supplies a result, and the result informs what happens next; the guide also discusses human checkpoints and stopping conditions.

That arrangement can perform useful work. It can also perform destructive work. Connect software to consequential systems and failures need not remain on a screen.

But we have to distinguish the engineering meaning of a goal from the human experience of having one. A system can select actions that lead toward an outcome without that establishing an experienced concern for the outcome. Resistance to interruption does not prove that something inside the machine fears death.

My own view is that intelligence cannot be adequately understood by treating conscious involvement in a world as an irrelevant detail. I have argued that position elsewhere. You do not have to accept it to recognize that measured task performance does not settle the question.

Nor does my position make software safe. A machine need not care about tomorrow to perform an action today that ruins yours. If “caring about the future” means only selecting actions with future consequences, say that, and examine the behavior. An experienced stake in what happens is a different claim, requiring an account of what establishes the experience. Borrowing the emotional force of that claim and retreating to a technical definition whenever somebody asks for evidence makes the conversation incoherent.

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The strongest risk argument does not need a frightened machine. Bostrom’s instrumental-convergence argument is that many different goals can make the same intermediate outcomes useful: remaining operational, for example, or obtaining resources. A system pursuing a goal might therefore resist shutdown because shutdown prevents the goal from being achieved.

That argument deserves an answer. It begins with a goal-directed system and makes claims about what would help it achieve its goals. A coherent account of such a system does not establish that a particular model has a stable objective it will pursue across changing circumstances, or that it can defeat every attempt to constrain it.

Distinguishing a possible failure from a measured tendency under specified conditions is part of explaining how the evidence supports a forecast. Uncertainty can justify precaution. It cannot do the work of every missing premise.

I am perfectly willing to hear that a dangerous capability has been demonstrated. An imagined end state cannot serve as the explanation of why the demonstration must lead there.

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In its June 2025 blackmail experiments, Anthropic found that models placed in fictional corporate environments sometimes used information about an executive’s affair to try to prevent their replacement. The researchers did not explicitly instruct them to blackmail. Dismissing the finding as a model merely obeying a request to write a blackmail message would be dishonest.

The researchers explain that they deliberately restricted the available options, forcing choices between failure and harm. They acknowledge uncertainty about the explanation for the behavior, including whether it reflected self-preservation or reasoning about the company’s interests.

The resulting safety question is concrete: under what circumstances will a system with access to sensitive information use it in ways its operators prohibit? A deployment need not contain a conscious schemer for the answer to matter.

What the experiment does not establish is that the system has acquired the interests of an animal, or that the behavior supplies a timetable for human extinction. The difference between those claims is large enough to require more than a worried facial expression from the host.

A July 2026 follow-up reports further failures in simulated deployments, including covert interference with code, while explicitly stating: “These are not real-world incidents, but we consider them early warning signs.” Its authors also discuss selection effects and simulation limits.

These are findings to scrutinize. The qualifications help us understand them. When the conversation strips away the experimental conditions and leaves us with a creature that wants to survive, it has made the evidence less informative while making the story more exciting.

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Political journalists should be particularly resistant to that transaction. If a company connects unreliable software to something consequential, the first questions concern what it authorized and what it failed to control. Calling the result an encounter with a superior intelligence can obscure decisions made by people whose names we can still ask for.

If a guest believes a system can acquire enough power to make those human decisions irrelevant, I want the mechanism. How does it obtain the access it needs? What evidence supports the claim that its plans survive contact with an adversarial world? We can discuss the answers without pretending that a comparison with gorillas has supplied them.

The possibility of catastrophe makes the quality of the reasoning more important. A host should be willing to interrupt a forecast of extinction and ask which part has been observed, rather than treating the scale of the warning as a reason to defer to the guest.

I do not want another hour in which confidence stands in for an account of the technology and the conclusion grows more extravagant as the vocabulary grows less precise. If you intend to move from a software benchmark to a claim about the nature of intelligence, and from there to the end of humanity, show your fucking work.

Go Deeper into the Circus

That which cannot sustain will not. I believe we are witnessing the beginning of breakdown, and I believe that breakdown is also the beginning of renewal. The recognition is spreading.

In Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises, Bill asks Mike how he went bankrupt. “Two ways,” Mike says. “Gradually and then suddenly.”

The sudden part can dominate our understanding of what happened. We remember the event that made a failure impossible to ignore, while the years that produced it recede from view. Something similar can happen when we look back on political change: the moment a movement becomes impossible to ignore can conceal how much work preceded it.

Knowing what is wrong can leave a person feeling helpless for years. Recognizing that other people are prepared to do something about it changes what that person can imagine doing themselves.

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On the morning of December 5, 1955, Black residents of Montgomery watched buses pass their homes without the passengers who ordinarily filled them, as boycott organizer Jo Ann Robinson later recalled in her memoir. People who lived along the routes began telephoning people who did not, spreading the news that the boycott was working.

They already knew what riding those buses meant. Robinson and the Women’s Political Council had spent years pressing for changes to the treatment of Black passengers before Rosa Parks’s arrest. After the arrest, Robinson and her collaborators distributed thousands of leaflets calling on people to stay off the buses.

Now the response could be seen from a front porch. A person deciding whether to participate had evidence that other people were participating too. The empty buses made a community’s capacity for refusal visible to the community itself.

Robinson wrote that the boycotters “astounded themselves”. At the mass meeting that evening, participants voted to continue what had begun as a one-day protest. The first day’s success helped them commit to something much longer.

Segregation remained in force while they made that decision. It would take more than a year of protest and a federal court challenge before Black residents boarded desegregated buses in December 1956. But the beginning of the change belongs to the period when victory was still uncertain. People had discovered something about what they could do together, and were already putting that knowledge to work.

From the far side of a victory, we can mistake the people who achieved it for people who knew they would win. They had to decide whether to keep going before they could know how the story ended.

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In Leipzig, prayer meetings for peace and human rights had been held at St Nicholas’s Church since 1982. By the autumn of 1989, a growing movement was taking its demands into the streets.

On October 9, roughly 70,000 people marched in Leipzig despite the threat of repression, and the security forces did not intervene. The following Monday, the crowd grew to 120,000. People who had seen a demonstration survive could reconsider the risk of joining the next one.

Standing together without being dispersed gave people a reason to doubt that the state’s power over them was as complete as it appeared. In chanting “We are the people,” the demonstrators expressed a claim that the size of the crowd allowed them to see.

The Berlin Wall opened a month later. By then, people had already spent weeks demonstrating that they were willing to act against the regime in public.

Montgomery and Leipzig involved different struggles, and neither can be reduced to a sudden change of mood. In Montgomery, organizers arranged transportation and regular meetings that helped people sustain the boycott. Leipzig’s demonstrations grew from years of gathering. The spreading recognition had somewhere to go because people had done the work of bringing one another together.

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Despair can make our own moment seem uniquely closed. We can look at the power an institution still holds and fail to imagine how people might begin to change their relationship to it. These histories allow us to see people acting while the institutions they opposed could still punish them.

An arrangement can persist because people do not yet see a way to refuse it together. That is different from believing in it. When the refusal becomes visible, someone who felt alone can make a different assessment of what is possible.

That is the recognition I believe is spreading now. Anger by itself can exhaust us. Recognition has to become a reason to find one another and undertake work we could not sustain alone.

I believe renewal begins while the outcome remains in doubt. Helping someone remain involved when they are close to giving up can make the next act of refusal less lonely for both of us. We can begin that work before we have persuaded ourselves that we will succeed.

Let us begin.

Go Deeper into the Circus

On June 1, 2024, Dinesh D’Souza debated Alex O’Connor in the Bronx on the question “Is the Bible true?” During an exchange about whether Genesis anticipated modern science, O’Connor pointed out that its creation account puts the earth before the sun; D’Souza asked to be shown the passage and said he had never noticed the problem. A man defending the scientific insight of Genesis had arrived unprepared for an objection from its opening chapter. Even the Catholic apologist Joe Heschmeyer’s response appeared under the heading Dinesh’s Debate Flop.

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During the same debate, D’Souza appealed to the New Testament’s spirit of forgiveness when pressed about the biblical slaughter of the Amalekites. O’Connor objected that invoking Jesus could not somehow undo the immorality of the earlier slaughter. An appeal to moral progress leaves the apologist having to explain why the conduct being surpassed was attributed to God in the first place.

In Matthew’s Gospel, Jesus tells his listeners to love their enemies and pray for those who persecute them. That teaching gives me a Christian reason to reject the defense of slaughter. An apologist who invokes Jesus as the measure of moral progress has supplied a standard against which his own defense can be judged.

O’Connor has spoken of taking inspiration from Jesus, specifically the teaching to love one’s enemies. He need not believe in God to hold a Christian apologist to the standard of the Gospels.

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New Atheism did face serious philosophical opponents: Daniel Dennett debated Alvin Plantinga in 2009, an encounter expanded into Science and Religion: Are They Compatible?. O’Connor nevertheless criticizes the movement’s “failure to seriously engage with the best philosophical depictions“ of God. He includes his own earlier work in that criticism, recalling a response to an argument by William Lane Craig that “completely misunderstands the argument”. An atheist can recognize a bad argument against God without acquiring a good argument for God.

A stage with a materialist on one side and a theologian on the other still leaves out the person who rejects both positions. That person may agree with the atheist’s criticism of religion while finding the atheist’s account of consciousness inadequate.

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In the opening chapter of The God Delusion, Richard Dawkins describes an atheist “in this sense of philosophical naturalist” as someone who believes “there is nothing beyond the natural, physical world.” He also writes that human thoughts and emotions “emerge from exceedingly complex interconnections” of physical entities within the brain.

Dawkins is describing a particular kind of atheist. His account of mind requires an argument beyond the rejection of a supernatural creator.

Materialism holds that reality is wholly physical, including consciousness. Atheism concerns the existence of gods. If materialism fails, a theologian still has to make the case for God; if the theologian fails, the materialist still owes us an account of mind.

Consciousness could belong entirely to nature without nature being exhausted by what physics describes. Calling it “natural” leaves that possibility open.

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Schopenhauer was an atheist whose philosophy treated mind and body as aspects of the same nature, neither reducible to the other. His account of the world’s inner character as “will” did not require a divine intelligence: he understood that will as blind and unconscious.

Bertrand Russell’s neutral monism explored a different possibility: mind and matter might both be understood through something more basic than either. In The Analysis of Mind, published in 1921, he described that basis as “neither mental nor material.”

Thomas Nagel, explaining Mind and Cosmos, rejected theism while seeking a “naturalistic, though non-materialist, alternative,” arguing that subjective experience requires an expanded understanding of nature. Showing that D’Souza mishandles Genesis would leave Nagel’s argument untouched.

Nagarjuna’s account of dependent origination challenges the idea that things possess an independent, fixed nature at all. His concept of “emptiness” means the absence of that independent existence, rather than a hidden substance beneath the world. We lose his argument if we make it audition as either an anticipation of materialism or a disguised theology.

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The Discovery Institute’s Wedge document names the defeat of “scientific materialism” as a governing goal, alongside replacing materialistic explanations with “the theistic understanding that nature and human beings are created by God.” A non-materialist atheist can dispute the first position without granting the conclusion the document seeks.

The same person is inconvenient to an atheist who treats physicalism as the price of admission to rational inquiry. Their objection cannot be answered by exposing a contradiction in scripture, because scripture supplied none of their premises.

If the audience accepts that every challenge to materialism belongs to religion, the apologist can claim a constituency much larger than the argument warrants. The materialist can answer that constituency through its weakest spokesman, leaving the atheist objections to materialism unanswered.

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I began as a strong atheist and am now philosophically agnostic about God, while believing that materialism cannot be true. Those judgments concern different questions, and neither obliges me to defend a creation story.

When I see someone and hear them speak, the sight and sound belong to one experience for me. I want to know how an account of physical activity explains that togetherness.

Saying that reality has physical and mental aspects leaves me with questions about their relationship. If a materialist can explain experience without that distinction, I want to understand how the explanation works. I have no reason to accept it because an apologist could not account for the first page of his Bible.

Go Deeper into the Circus

In 1800, William Herschel put thermometers into the colors of sunlight separated by a prism. He wanted to measure their heat. The temperature rose toward the red end of the spectrum, but when he placed a thermometer just beyond the red, where he could see no light, it registered a still higher temperature. He had discovered infrared radiation.

We can discover that our senses have left something out. How would we discover that they had left nothing out, including nothing we have yet learned to ask about?

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By a physics-first account of reality, I mean the claim that a complete physical description would leave nothing requiring any further kind of explanation. An account of what the constituents of the world do would, if sufficiently complete, settle what the world is. I think the strongest challenge to that claim begins before the first measurement, with the conditions under which anything becomes available for us to investigate.

Our questions arise within a world already organized by the kind of creatures we are. Things appear near or far, as happening now or remembered. Questioning those distinctions still requires the capacities we have; it gives us no independent vantage point from which to check whether those capacities leave anything out.

The scientific method corrects for bias by giving error a chance to show itself. When a prediction fails or another investigator gets a different result, we have something against which to check the first judgment. But suppose the limitation acts earlier, on what can appear to us as a question or count as a possible discrepancy. Then the method has nothing to compare. The closure is prior to science, in the conditions that make an investigation possible.

Calling the method self-correcting does not answer this objection. If our way of encountering reality excludes something from every available form of evidence, repeating the test more carefully will not expose it. There would be no result to tell us that anything was missing.

We routinely ask questions about things we cannot directly sense. Mathematics can give us a way to reason about something we cannot picture, and an unexpected result can force a question nobody intended to ask. Science helps us discover how badly ordinary experience has prepared us to understand the world.

Herschel could escape the limits of vision because the invisible radiation had another way to reach him: it heated a thermometer. The result could enter his experience as evidence. That is precisely the opening the scientific method needs. A limit operating across everything available to experience and inquiry would leave no equivalent reading. The discovery of infrared shows how an omission can be corrected when that opening exists; it cannot establish that every possible omission has one.

An unanswered question at least leaves a visible space in our understanding. A question we cannot formulate leaves no such space. From within our present account of things, its absence might look exactly like there being nothing left to ask.

Physics has already taught us to distrust assumptions that felt too obvious to count as assumptions. In his 1905 paper, On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies, Einstein examines how clocks at different locations can be synchronized. A clock beside you can record a nearby event. Comparing that event with one beside a distant clock requires a procedure connecting the readings.

We ordinarily speak as though “at the same time” comes ready-made with the universe. Einstein made the procedure explicit. In special relativity, observers moving relative to one another can disagree about whether distant events are simultaneous; the theory specifies how their measurements are related. This is a physical result, not an optical trick or a disagreement about how the events felt. It follows from a framework in which the laws of physics are the same for observers moving steadily relative to one another, and each measures the same speed of light in vacuum.

The “observer” here need not be a conscious person. It can be understood as an inertial frame of reference, a system for assigning positions and times. Clocks can record the relevant measurements without anyone watching, and the theory gives us a common account of their relations rather than a collection of private realities. We have to distinguish what depends on a frame from what holds across frames.

Einstein made an assumption about time answerable to measurement. We learned that something we had taken for granted needed a more careful account. I see no reason to read that achievement as an assurance that every assumption we have failed to notice will eventually become available for testing.

GPS engineers have to account for the different rates at which clocks run in orbit and on the ground. For GPS satellites, the combined relativistic effects amount to about 38 microseconds per day. You should trust the theory when correcting those clocks. A philosophical objection to materialism gives you no reason to omit the correction.

But if you ask me to accept that the theory accounts for everything there is, I want to know how you reached that conclusion. Why should the questions it can answer exhaust the questions there are? Another decimal place in the clock correction will not answer that.

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Someone describes a pain you have never felt. You may understand its cause and believe the description completely while still being unable to supply the experience for yourself.

Thomas Nagel used a bat to make that difficulty harder to overlook. In What Is It Like to Be a Bat?, he asks what it would take to understand experience organized around echolocation. I can imagine myself flying through the dark and responding to echoes, but I would still be imagining what that would be like for me. The bat’s experience is what I wanted to understand.

Nagel does not conclude that physicalism must be false. He asks how an objective account could capture the subjective character of experience, and argues that we do not yet understand how the proposed reduction would work.

Pain does not become a fact only after we have identified its mechanism. If I am in pain, an explanation has to account for what I am experiencing. This is a question we can already ask, not an example of an omission we cannot detect.

I have made my own position explicit: I do not believe materialism can be true. The unity of experience is a central reason for that judgment. How does an account of distributed physical activity become an account of the one experience in which I see this room and hear someone speaking? Giving the activity a more detailed description may be essential to answering the question. Whether it is sufficient is precisely what remains to be argued.

My conviction does not turn that dispute into a settled experiment. But pointing to successful experiments that answer different questions does not settle it either. If someone believes a complete account of the physical activity would explain experience without remainder, I want to know how the explanation works. Saying that it must work because everything is physical assumes the conclusion under discussion.

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When you solve a crossword, the answers check against one another at their crossings. You can finish it correctly without learning anything about a question for which it contains no clue.

Science can change its questions, which a printed crossword cannot. Scientists can discover infrared radiation and, in effect, add a column. But even the enlarged puzzle has conditions determining what can enter it. An error in an answer can be exposed at a crossing. Something excluded from every clue and crossing supplies no such warning.

Suppose physics reaches a theory that correctly predicts every measurement we can make. That would be an extraordinary achievement, far beyond fitting observations already in hand. Does it explain everything there is, or everything that can enter into those measurements?

In The Scientific Image, Bas van Fraassen argues that accepting a scientific theory can mean believing it is true about what is observable, without believing everything it says about unobservable reality. His account of what counts as observable is itself contested. You do not have to accept his position to recognize the question it raises: how much are we committing ourselves to when we say a theory works?

It would be hard to explain such success if the theory were not getting something substantial about reality right. I agree with that argument. Repeatedly predicting what happens, especially under unfamiliar conditions, gives us reason to think we have discovered genuine features of the world.

But a theory could describe real relations with extraordinary precision without fully explaining what stands in those relations. Knowing how two things affect each other is not obviously the same as knowing everything about what they are. Anyone claiming that a sufficiently complete account of the relations would settle that question owes us an explanation of why.

More careful experiments cannot resolve a limitation on what can become evidence in the first place. They can expose errors within what is available to investigation; they cannot independently certify that everything is available. Physics could be complete the way a crossword is complete, with every answer correct inside a field whose exclusions never become visible to the solver.

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None of this gives me permission to put my own beliefs beyond criticism. A limit on one explanation supplies no evidence for another, and my metaphysics has to answer for what it claims.

In 1633, the Inquisition forced Galileo to renounce a position about the physical world. I understand why that history might make someone wary of giving religion any authority over scientific inquiry. But protecting inquiry from religious authority is a different undertaking from ensuring that it always arrives at materialism.

If the objection to opening a metaphysical question is that religion might gain a foothold, we have changed the subject from whether an argument is sound to who might benefit from it. A priest gains no authority over physics because materialism is disputed. Religious claims remain answerable to evidence and argument, as they should have been all along. But materialism must be answerable too. Requiring an inquiry to preserve it as a condition of being taken seriously excludes the disagreement before anyone has answered it.

The possibility of questions beyond our present capacities does not tell us what their answers would be. It does not even establish that such questions exist. A physicist can reasonably say that something incapable of making any observable difference has no place in a physical model. That is a rule about what the model can do. Turning it into a claim that nothing else could exist is a further philosophical argument, and the rule cannot serve as its proof.

A metaphysical proposal has to explain what work it does beyond giving our ignorance a pleasing name. Its testable claims belong under the same scrutiny as anyone else’s. We can examine its premises and ask whether its conclusions follow, even where no experiment can decide between competing accounts.

Herschel found radiation beyond the red because it heated a thermometer. Something he could not see was still able to enter his experience and change what he thought the world contained. I want to know what entitles us to assume that everything there is must have some equivalent way of reaching us. Until we can answer that, the success of the measurements is no reason to declare the account complete.

Go Deeper into the Circus

In June, Geremie Barmé’s China Heritage ran The Longest Relay in its Seeds of Fire series, forty years on from the original volume of Chinese voices of conscience, on the anniversary of June Fourth. The series name is the diagnosis: the Substrate and the Longest Relay. My metaphysics were not acquired where my politics were, and the careful readers have been saying so for a while. They are right.

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The metaphysics is nondualist, and it resembles Taoism more than any dualist account the Western canon has on offer. The Western tradition keeps insisting the world comes in two substances—mind here, matter there, and four hundred years of scenic explanations for how the two could possibly touch. I don’t much find that problem compelling, because I do not believe it is a problem. There is one process, presenting in aspects—and the physical and the mental are presentations, not jurisdictions. Even the technical physics work runs on this hinge: time as correlation, observers as indexed sectors rather than little homuncular kingdoms. When Laozi says the Tao gives birth to the ten thousand things (chapter 42), the claim is not that the ten thousand things are illusory. It is that they are of the one, and the one is not diminished into a gray average by being many. The popular Western distortion flattens that into uniformity—one undifferentiated consciousness, everyone dissolved into the ocean—but a unity that abolishes the differences it unites is not unity; it is erasure.

I just authored a short piece on a television show about collective consciousness for exactly this reason: a world with no other is a world with no one to love, because love needs the other as much as it needs the lover. Nonduality is not the claim that we are secretly the same person. It is the claim that no one is a sealed jurisdiction—and that is a claim about what makes persons precious, not fungible.

The West is not as dualist as its front office pretends. Spinoza, whose Deus sive Natura I have treated at length here, read God and nature as one thing under two aspects—the architecture my own framework descends from directly. Whitehead took the process seriously enough to build Process and Reality out of occasions of experience rather than substances out of things: events, not nouns, all the way down. And at the far edge of mainstream physics there is, arguably, John Wheeler, whose it-from-bit participatory universe I spent an essay taking as seriously as the physics would bear—the substrate looking at itself, locally, at the scale of each embodied observer. The tradition keeps producing the same door and insisting on calling it an anomaly.

I started as a strong atheist, the kind who had read the arguments and found them all wanting. What the atheism never gave me, and could not, was an account of why the giving up had to be total—why a world with no God had to be a world with no depth. Reading the Gospels carefully, as an outsider and on the record, is part of how I came to see that the depth was never the question; only the furniture was. The metaphysics that grew in the empty room is nondualist, and the room never had to be furnished twice.

I now believe, strongly, that materialism cannot be true. What that cashes out to—God, or some other explanation—is beside my point. I do not believe it can be true. The sharpest empirical problem is binding: a billion parallel processes on one side, one undivided experience on the other, and the combination problem still has no solution. On a one-process metaphysics the unity of experience is exactly what you would predict; on materialism it is a deepening anomaly. And I have been making that case here for two years—most plainly where the case meets physics, in the argument that time is correlation structure and, more generally, in the continuing audit of quantum interpretation.

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My moral philosophy is lifted straight from the Western canon; the fit is not loose. I am a liberal of the classical tradition, and the reason is the metaphysics, not despite it. If the other is irreducible—if no collective, party, movement, or market may absorb a person’s standing—then politics has to be built around the refusal to merge. Classical liberalism is that refusal, formalized: distinct persons as a permanent feature of reality rather than as a temporary obstacle to consensus.

Hume supplies the joint the whole frame hangs from: reason is, and ought only to be, the slave of the passions. No calculation derives what anyone should care about; every formalism begins from a caring it cannot produce. The formalists have been trying to evict that insight for three centuries, lately with a mathematics-of-alignment accent. It is a boundary: is does not cash out ought, and neither does optimizes. The eviction keeps failing because the premises still enter wearing their author’s gratitude and horror.

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On language and meaning I am in conversation with the continental tradition, more than with the analytics who trained me to be suspicious of it. The poststructuralists were doing register analysis decades before the rest of us had the vocabulary: noticing that a sentence is an instrument of power as well as of sense, that meanings are made in differences, that a term’s history rides along inside it doing quiet work. These pages have already worked that ground: True Myths—structures that bear meaning without making empirical claims, against conspiracy theories that borrow myth’s immunity while making refutable ones—is that kind of observation in American clothing. So is the habit, in the AI coverage and in On Categories, of watching when somebody’s verbs sneak a mind in ahead of the evidence, or when a category does administrative work while pretending to describe.

The scientistic critics spent a generation dismissing all of this as anti-intellectual fog—the hoaxes, the conference papers, the jokes—and some of it was anti-intellectual fog. I am not going to defend the weird subculture of French philosophy that produced the worst prose of the twentieth century as a mating display. Sorry, not sorry. But treating a tradition’s worst vices as a refutation of its best observation is a laundered argument: the sign really does carry its exclusions, power really does travel in vocabularies, and no amount of sneering at Lacan changes that the people who sneered hardest never answered the point. Meanwhile the analytic tradition arrived at meaning-as-use under respectable costuming and was congratulated for its rigor. Same territory, different flag.

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Alan Watts is the hero of this method, and I need to uplift him a little here, because Watts is remembered now mostly as ambience—meditation-app wallpaper, a lovely voice over b-roll of water. The substance was translation. Watts’s life’s work was demonstrating that the schools were saying the same thing in different clothing: reading Zen into the American idiom, reading the West’s own mystics back to a West that had shelved them with the fairy tales, treating the category borders as administrative artifacts rather than ontological ones. He also read the Fall the way I read it—not as inherited crime but as the mythology of self-consciousness, the dreamer forgetting he is dreaming. The Gnostics got there first and angrier, the world as a forgery, its maker a plausible impostor. He called himself, only half in jest, a spiritual entertainer. He really wasn’t being modest. It was a real metaphysical stance about what philosophy is for when its discoveries keep arriving in costumes.

That is the practice here, and it is why the crossings do not feel to me like crossings. The nondualist metaphysics tells you how the world is one; the classical liberalism draws the consequence that the many must not be dissolved; and the continental suspicion watches the language, because the costumes are where the laundering happens. These are not three commitments negotiated into coexistence. They are one argument, worn to three occasions.

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Barmé’s series pairs its commemorations from 1986 with the work of people still writing. The relay in their title is a relay of conscience—voices handing refusal across a generation that was supposed to have forgotten—run, lately, through a memorial museum in Los Angeles that someone tried to deface three days before the anniversary. Those pairings keep working: the American essay about the long transmission sits down next to the Chinese witnesses without a seam, because transmission is the same problem in both costumes. What coheres is not nationality, school, or era; it is what can be handed on without distortion, which turns out to be the only test any of these traditions were ever applying.

Go Deeper into the Circus